George Orwell
2) 1984
The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace. The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its view that speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England and the existence of new, external threats. (from Wikipedia)
...4) Burmese Days
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities, which was written deliberately in a non-academic tone. Its target audience was the middle and upper class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London.
..."Inside the Whale" is an essay in three parts written by George Orwell in 1940. It is primarily a review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller with Orwell discursing more widely over English literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The biblical story of Jonah and the whale is used as a metaphor for accepting experience without seeking to change it, Jonah inside the whale being comfortably protected from the problems of the outside world.
..."Raffles and Miss Blandish" is an essay by English writer George Orwell first published in Horizon in October 1944 as "The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish". The essay contrasts the A. J. Raffles crime stories with the 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish by the crime writer James Hadley Chase. In the semi-pornographic crime novel Orwell decries the breaking down of all taboos
...11) Rudyard Kipling
George Orwell's essay on Rudyard Kipling.
The essay describes the experience of the English narrator, possibly Orwell himself, called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant while working as a police officer in Burma. Because the locals expect him to do the job, he does so against his better judgment, his anguish increased by the elephant's slow and painful death. The story is regarded as a metaphor for British imperialism, and for Orwell's view that "when the white man turns
...13) Collected Essays
One of the most thought-provoking and vivid essayists of the twentieth century, George Orwell fought the injustices of his time with singular vigor through pen and paper. In this selection of essays, he ranges from reflections on his boyhood schooling and the profession of writing to his views on the Spanish Civil War and British imperialism.
Excerpt:
"When the Duke of Wellington described the British army as “the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink,” he was probably speaking no more than the truth. But what is significant is that his opinion would have been echoed by any non-military Englishman for nearly a hundred years subsequently."
Excerpt:
“...it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of igniting facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish.”
Excerpt:
"It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call
...17) New Words
At present the formation of new words is a slow process (I have read somewhere that English gains about six and losses about four words a year) and no new words are deliberately coined except as names for material objects. Abstract words are never coined at all, though old words (e. g. ‘condition’. ‘reflex’, etc.) are sometimes twisted into new meanings for scientific purposes. What I am going to suggest here is that it would be quite feasible
...Excerpt:
"A dozen years ago anyone who had foretold the political line-up of today would have been looked on as a lunatic. And yet the truth is that the present situation — not in detail, of course, but in its main outlines — ought to have been predictable even in the golden age before Hitler. Something like it was bound to happen as soon as British security was seriously threatened."
Notes on Nationalism is an essay completed in May 1945 by George Orwell and published in the first issue of the British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" Polemic, in October 1945. Orwell discusses nationalism and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and to become more ignorant towards facts. Orwell shows his concern for the social state of Europe and the rest of the world because
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