Throughout the 1940s, George Orwell was formulating the ideas about language and politics that found their ultimate expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His essays from this period are a plain-spoken pleasure, despite their contradictions
By 1940, George Orwell had behind him four conventional “social” novels and, more significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his classic account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.