"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." So starts this 1941 essay in which Orwell argues that the outdated British class system was hampering the war effort, and that in order to defeat Hitler, Britain needed a
Few figures in intellectual history have proved as notorious and ambiguous as Niccolo Machiavelli. But while his treatise The Prince made his name synonymous with autocratic ruthlessness and cynical manipulation, The Discourses (c.1517) shows a radically
No political concept is more used, and misused, than that of democracy. Nearly every regime today claims to be democratic, but not all "democracies" allow free politics, and free politics existed long before democratic franchises. This book is a short acc
In this illuminating celebration of the political world, Bernard Crick asserts that politics, with its compromises and power struggles, remains the only tested alternative to government by coercion, making both freedom and order possible in heterogeneous
Not only was George Orwell one of the greatest writers and most important political thinkers of the twentieth century, he is also the author of the bestselling Penguin title of all time: Animal Farm first published in Penguin in 1951. These heartfelt essa
Featuring the column Orwell wrote for the Socialist weekly Tribune (where he was the literary editor), As I Please also includes Orwell's spirited defense of English cooking, notes on the perfect cup of tea, and accounts of the difficulties with - and ult
My Country Right or Left features notes and essays on the Second World War (including two war diaries), reflections on life working for the BBC, reviews of Hitlers Mein Kampf and books by T.S. Eliot, Orwell's "London Letters" to the Partisan Review, and h
George Orwell is a major figure in twentieth-century literature. The author of Down and Out in Paris and London, Nineteen Eighty-four, and Animal Farm, he published ten books and two collections of essays during his lifetime -- but in terms of actual word
