George Orwell has never been more quoted and misquoted. Can he be rescued from the soundbites?
George Orwell remains a work in progress. He is, or has become, a meme, a global writer, a national treasure, a London statue, a scholarly society, a Prize and a Journal, a trope and a show, various movies, various murals, various misquotations, two adjectives, at least half a dozen fictions and most recently a dead metaphor with plenty more accolades to come.
George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Colls is an intellectual biography which offers an original account of Orwell's life and work from his birth in the high noon of British imperialism in 1903, to his death on the eve of the Cold War in 1950. Orwell's life played out against a background of two world wars, two great revolutions, one long global depression, the rise and rise of Communism, and the war-time pre-eminence of the United. Yet no matter how alert he was to all these great struggles, and no matter how guarded he was in his personal life, Orwell never turned away from the question of who he was, and the contradictions that entailed.
His two great modern masterpieces Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) arrived to define the age he lived in. Interest in him has never abated since; no writer is more quoted or misquoted. Orwell is in danger of being lost to soundbites. Colls reveals the author once again.
