Why Orwell Matters

An old radical adage states that the will to command is not as corrupting as the will to obey.

The absorbing thing about his independence was that it had to be learned; acquired; won.

If we ask what it is he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do . . . He is not a genius — what a relief! What an encouragement. For

He would appear never to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers; this alone is a clue to why he still matters.

The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own

By teaching himself in theory and practice, some of the teaching being rather pedantic, he became a great humanist.

he made his own living in his own way and never had to call any man master. He never enjoyed a stable income, and never had a completely reliable publishing outlet. Uncertain as to whether he was a novelist or not, he added to the richness of English fiction but learned to concentrate on the essay form. Thus, he faced the competing orthodoxies and

It might not be too much to say that the clarity and courage of Orwell’s prose, which made him so readily translatable for Poles and Ukrainians, also played a part in making English a non-imperial lingua franca. In any event, his writings on colonialism are an indissoluble part of his lifelong engagement with the subjects of power and cruelty and f

he speculates on the nature of personal integrity: Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely