George Orwell: A Life

by Bernard Crick

Here is the long-awaited complete biography of one of the greatest, most enigmatic English writers of the twentieth century, the brilliant author of Down and Out in Paris and London, Animal Farm, and 1984. The latter two books have become classics, in English and in translation.

"At times," says Bernard Crick, "he almost literally cared for his writing more than his life, certainly more than his comfort and physical well-being." He died at forty-six, ravaged by tuberculosis after years of overexertion, hardship, and self-neglect.

By the time of his death, however, George Orwell (1903-1950) was already a world-renowned writer who had achieved literary fame and success, and not only as a novelist. Many of his political essays and journalistic pieces can claim a place among the great texts of political theory, as well as English literature, their strength and style forged by "an almost reckless commitment to speak out unwelcome truths" in simple, powerful language.

Bernard Crick is the first and only biographer to have been given unrestricted access to the Orwell Estate and archives by Sonia Orwell, the author's late widow, as well as having unlimited rights of quotation from his published and unpublished works to use as Crick alone saw fit.

Crick has also interviewed many of Orwell's distinguished friends and less well known contemporaries about every period of Orwell's life, from his oppressed, rebellious schooldays at St. Cyprian's and Eton, to his short career in Burma as an imperial policeman, to fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War, through his final writing period on the remote island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides.

The result is a penetrating biography unlike any other about him, for Crick masterfully relates the private, sometimes sordid facts of Orwell's life to the substance of his writing and to the inconstant politics of his day, in a story well told with sympathy but by no means uncritically.

Crick confronts the multiple paradoxes of Orwell, avoiding any simple distinctions between the man and his work. It is not enough to read Orwell's fiction as disguised autobiography, nor to treat his documentary journalism as only recorded fact.

George Orwell: A Life superbly illuminates the complex relationship between the daily experiences and the monumental writings of this private, often mystifying man who was so intensely "the wintry conscience of a generation."

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Sir Bernard Rowland Crick was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views were often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

He was very tall. Not quite as tall as Clint Eastwood but taller than Sean Connery. He was the patron saint of telling people what they didn’t want to know, and he was okay with that. He was a one man Awkward Squad. I didn’t realise how posh he was. His family was, he said, “lower upper middle-class”. His father worked as a manager in the (wait for it) Opium Department of the Government of India. Yeah, there was an Opium Department. As soon as Eric was born in India his mother took him back to England and he then only saw his father once before he was 8. Already you have material for many therapy sessions in later life! (Orwell was the last person on earth to have therapy, he would just have nailed up another sagging bookshelf.)



He lived a very interesting and at times dramatic life and died tragically, and this book tells the whole thing very well, almost too well, if you know what I mean. I’m exhausted!

Because the Blairs didn’t have quite enough money, Eric (as he was originally) had to be clever and get scholarships which he did. So he went as a boarder to a Prep school, aged 8, and there he learned what cruel arbitrary dictatorship was. He hated it soooo much. Check out his essay “Such Such were the Joys”. At age 14 he passed the entrance exams (again) and went to Eton. Eton! The all time most aristocratic privileged and expensive school in the country, the place where such people as Boris Johnson and his fellow toffs learned that they were born to get all the top jobs.

After being clever & passing exams to get to Eton he then stopped working and ended up bottom of the class. University was out. So at age 19 his father thought he should follow in his father’s footsteps and get a job in a far-flung colony of the great Empire. So he became a policeman in Burma. Of course! Well, at least it wasn’t the Opium Department. In Burma he became a deep and deadly hater of the imperial British Empire and all its evil works.

When he got sick of Burma and came back to England, he lived with his parents, as you do, but then had a notion to cast off his entitlement and go and live as a tramp, a hobo, a down and out. This was a very radical, weird thing to do, a lot stranger than a beatnik or a hippy dropping out in the 50s and 60s. He would stash raggedy tramp clothes at friends’ houses and leave home and change from his good clobber and just disappear for two or three months. This went on for a couple of years. His parents must have thought he’d gone off his trolley.

What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether.



He had a fixed notion that he wanted to become a writer but he didn’t know what sort of writer, so he started with conventional novels and got conventional part time jobs. This was after he wrote Down and Out in London and Paris and gave up the tramping.

None of these early books sold. Spoiler alert, none of his books sold much until the famous last two, and he was dead before the big money from them started rolling in. He lived in a state of near poverty most of his life, therefore. In 1934 we read

On the ground floor there was a tramdriver and his wife., and in the basement a plumber. George took a weekly bath in the public baths.

Reminds me of the miner who indignantly said “I have a bath every Friday night, whether I need one or not.”

He got married and moved from London to a teeny village and a little cottage without electricity which was also a grocery store, so he became a grocer and a keeper of hens and goats. They loved the goat. The called it The Holy Goat.

Then came 1936 and the Spanish Civil War. Up till then he was a vague kind of leftwinger but didn’t pay too much attention to politics. That all changed. He went to Spain and fought in actual trenches. His daring adventures were terminated by a sniper’s bullet which went through his throat and out the other side. Sounds fatal to me but it wasn’t. It did damage his voice though. No surprise.
There’s a feeling you get with Orwell that he did things to get a book out of them – Burma for Burmese Days, tramps for Down and Out, Spain for Homage to Catalonia. In one case he was paid to go and find out how the poor lived up North, and this became The Road to Wigan Pier. Well, all of this is what might be considered these days to be immersive journalism. But he got much more immersed than any journalist I heard of.

In Spain he came upon the Heinz 57 Varieties of the left wing. There were communists and socialists and anarchists. But there were different kinds of each – there were Marxists who weren’t communists, for instance. Every group traduced all the others and called them vermin in the pay of Moscow or London. George figured out in Spain what he was – a democratic socialist and an anti-Communist. He wrote : “Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force.” The implication of that is that he believed in revolution himself. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. One thing he hated the Communists for was “betraying the revolution” (see Animal Farm).
Meaning that the Russian revolution had been stolen by despotic Communists who were now practicing state capitalism and calling it socialism.

Pravda, 16 December 1936:

In Catalonia the elimination of Trotskyites and Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun. It will be carried out with the same energy as it was carried out in the Soviet Union.

Aside from the bullet through the throat, Orwell had a bracing (= physically wretched and horrific) but thrilling experience:

I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realise that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.

Now that we know that the possibility of revolution in any country has faded to insignificance, these are long-dead arguments, but if you read Orwell’s biography you are going to get pages of them. (“Orwell’s opposition to centralisation or “oligarchical collectivism” came close at this time to some aspects of anarchist thought”).



He was amusingly described as an “intellectual anti-intellectual” and as “a fellow-travelling tightrope walker”. He struggled all the time trying to wrench the idea of patriotism away from the fascists and the conservatives. I really sympathised with this, it’s still a problem. (If I see the English flag displayed in a street march or outside a house I always assume they’re far right white supremacists.) When the Second World War rolled around and it was presented as a fight between the democracies and the dictatorships, Orwell was constantly reminding British readers of the existence of “six hundred million disenfranchised human beings” in the Empire. But nevertheless he decided “the bad must be defended against the worse”.

He was a bit of a grouch and a puritan in some ways, hated all modern contraptions like the radio (!) even though he appeared on the BBC many times. (But there is no existing recording of any of his broadcasts, how sad.) He was dogged by the awful disease TB, which killed so many people back then, such as Jimmie Rodgers the country singer and my own father’s first wife.
When he was on his deathbed he married his second wife Sonia, she was 31, he was 47, and he died two months later. That’s a whole other story! With Orwell you can go on and on… he’s always either saying something great or doing something interesting.

UPDATE :

It's possible I read the wrong biography.... see this non-review for further information

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Terry Clague · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this, it strikes me that I probably need to re-read most things which probably rules me out of new books for the next thirty years. A brilliant biography, complete with an introduction that should be (it probably already is) required reading for anyone contemplating writing this kind of book. Orwell requested in his Will that no biography be written, and thought that a truthful biography was impossible because "every life viewed from the inside would be a series of disappointments too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate". He didn't get his wish, but he did get a careful biographer who goes to some lengths to check facts and conventional wisdom.

Orwell is such a giant of political literature that there's not much for me to add, perhaps save to highlight such things as:

- he was taught "rare and strange words" at Eton by a near-blind Aldous Huxley
- his ship to Burma departed from Birkenhead
- he anticipated Pulp's Common People in his tramping which he could "get out of at any time" according to a gym mistress friend of his sister
- the other names he considered were Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways
- Ulysses influenced him greatly as he dismissed how it was originally received - "art implies selection...Joyce is attempting to select and represent events and thoughts as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction"
- the nature of him and his work perhaps leads readers to see themselves in these pages, e.g. "like Dr. Johnson, his interlocutory opinions were often excessively decisive, even deliberately provocative" (Orwell as pub bore / columnist / observational comedian)
- he and H.G. Wells had the most enjoyable disagreement over lunch in which Wells was called out on his debating technique: "every time I try to tell you how, you ask me what; and every time I try to tell you what, you ask me how"
- one can only imagine how extraordinary the weekly editorial meetings of The Tribune were with Orwell as Literary Editor and Aneurin Bevan as an Editorial Director
- at a lunch he spied Kingsley Amis and asked his friend to to switch seats so that he didn't have to look at "that corrupt face"
- his values may have remained optimistic, but his expectations became pessimistic - "he was a moderate only as a means, not as an ends"
- he could deliver a mean aphorism: "at 50, everyone has the face he deserves"

Along with all this, the author manages to provide a stunningly good synopses of 1984 which "is a long premeditated, rational warning against totalitarian tendencies in societies like our own rather than a sick prophecy about neo-Nazi takeover, still less a scream of despair and recantation of his democratic Socialism."

[Graham Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his will George Orwell, or perhaps it was Eric Arthur Blair, requested that there should be no biography. This was partly due to the immensely private, even secretive, nature of the man. Beyond this, and intriguingly for a writer who produced so much autobiographical work, Orwell was deeply distrustful of biography. In his essay on Dali he states that ‘autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats’.

Bernard Crick’s book was the first full length Orwell biography in what has since become a crowded field. Crick, at the time Professor of Politics at Birbeck College, University of London, was the first writer on Orwell to be given full access to his papers. When he wrote the book many of Orwell’s friends and colleagues were still alive, so he was able to interview and correspond with a wide cast of characters who knew him from his childhood onwards.

Crick makes no pretence that he can view his subject from the ‘inside’ and say what he felt or thought at any particular moment. His portrait of Orwell is built from the outside and centred around the public man and his work. For all Crick’s avoidance of psychological interpretation a clear portrait does emerge, albeit of a complex, highly reserved, emotionally guarded and enigmatic man who compartmentalised his friends to such an extent that, after his death, many of them were often surprised to discover who also knew him.

Even in 1980, when Crick’s book first appeared, it was a commonplace that there was a great deal of autobiography in Orwell’s fiction, but Crick was perhaps the first Orwell scholar to contend that there was also a large amount of imagination in Orwell’s autobiographical books and essays - Down and out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, Such, Such were the Joys, and so on. He demonstrates convincingly that these works are not straightforward documentary but an artful mixture of fact and fiction designed to make a polemical point about education, imperialism or poverty. Events are freely transposed and sometimes simply invented. Inconvenient facts, such as Orwell having an aunt in Paris who lent him money and provided other assistance when he was in need, are suppressed in the interests of dramatic shape and impact. Orwell was concerned with the truth but clearly made a distinction between truth and mere facts. These works are truthful to Orwell’s feelings and ideas rather than literally accurate documents of his experience.

Orwell’s widow, Sonia Orwell, took exception to what she saw as Crick’s attack on his honesty. From my own, more dispassionate perspective, I viewed it differently. Crick’s analysis of these ‘autobiographical’ works has deepened my appreciation of Orwell’s artistry as a writer.

In 1936 Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned him to write a book about unemployment in the North of England. What Orwell witnessed in his two months travelling around the depression hit parts of England finally converted him to the socialist cause. But it was the culmination of a long process - he had been mixing with socialist intellectuals for a number of years and taking a close if critical interest in what they had to say - and not the Damascene conversion he presents it as in the book.

Having suddenly declared his commitment to Socialism Orwell immediately set to work attacking the socialists. The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is a prolonged, generalised, and spirited polemic against the very kind of middle class socialists who were likely to read the book, but who he believed were alienating large numbers of ordinary people from the socialist movement. Crick points out that Orwell’s argument reflects the limitations of his own, rather narrow, experience of the socialist world. Orwell argues passionately that liberty and justice should be the watchwords of Socialism, but he also overestimates the influence on public opinion of Marxist intellectuals of the sort he was familiar with from Hampstead parties, and never mentions the most likely reason for the lack of popular support for Socialism - the failure of the Labour Party and the Trades Unions to provide radical leadership.

Still, this kind of devil’s advocacy became Orwell’s trademark. In the early thirties he sometimes described himself, with characteristic use of paradox, as a Tory-anarchist and his Socialism was invigorated by a healthy dash of both anarchism and individualism. ‘Liberty’, he once said, ‘is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. Orwell spent a lot of time telling his socialist brothers and sisters things they emphatically did not want to hear.

He was something of a proto-environmentalist. He loved the countryside and disliked the city. When he lived in a small village in Hertfordshire in the 1930s he kept goats and chickens and was a keen gardener. He sometimes filled his column in the Left-wing publication Tribune with observations on the changing seasons, the mating habits of toads and the pleasures of Woolworths roses. This didn’t always go down well with his readers who failed to see the relevance to the socialist cause. One reader wrote in to complain that roses were bourgeois. But for Orwell there was clearly a connection between the simple life and the decent society he craved. Or perhaps it was simply another of those intriguing tensions, paradoxes even, which characterise Orwell’s thought and feeling. He accepted that a high degree of mechanisation was a prerequisite of the just society he wished to see but was simultaneously hostile to the highly mechanised society.

The comradeship Orwell experienced serving in the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War confirmed and strengthened his belief in Socialism (interestingly POUM was, in fact, anarchist dominated). He was, however, lucky to get out of Spain alive. A fascist bullet through the throat nearly did for him and then the Communists tried to get hold of him (POUM had been denounced, falsely, by the Stalinists as fascist collaborators who had betrayed the revolution). After Spain it was clear to Orwell that the Soviet Union was simply another form of dictatorship, which shared many features in common with Fascism, and the ideas that led to Animal Farm and 1984 began to take shape in his mind.

In his essay on Dickens Orwell remarks that Dickens is a writer ‘well worth stealing’. The same applies to Orwell who was stolen by, among many others, the Cold War warriors of the American Right. Unfamiliar with Orwell’s political background, and appearing to almost wilfully misunderstood the text in front of them, some American reviewers praised Animal Farm as anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. It was neither. Far from being anti-socialist it is against tyranny and not about the tragedy of revolution but the tragedy of revolution betrayed. The book came out of Orwell’s conviction that if there was to be a possibility of transformative Socialism the ‘Soviet myth’ had to be destroyed.

Similar misreadings continued with 1984 but, as Crick demonstrates, rather than being a repudiation of Orwell’s Socialism (Crick provides ample evidence that he remained a radical socialist right to the end), or a prediction of a communist or fascist takeover of Britain it is, in fact, an imaginative extrapolation of existing totalitarian tendencies in all societies - including the Western democracies.

1984 and Animal Farm are works of enduring importance (Animal Farm is by some distance Orwell’s best work of fiction, possessing a lightness of touch quite absent from his other novels) but his greatest work is to be found in his essays, journalism and non-fiction books. His essays on Dickens, Kipling and Henry Miller mix literary criticism with sociological analysis. He pioneered the serious analysis of popular culture. His later essays explore the relationship between the corruption of language and totalitarianism.

The relationship between the plain-speaking Orwell of the essays and the diffident, socially awkward Blair of real life, is a fascinating one. Crick, however, puts on his anti-psychological hat and looks the other way. The name change, he avers, was made for practical reasons and there was no fundamental character split. George was simply an extension of Eric or his ideal self-image. True as far as it goes, but you can’t help feeling he has only brushed the surface of a complicated matter.

Orwell was a mass of contradictions and the deceptive simplicity of his prose style masks an extraordinary complexity of thought. The committed socialist who was profoundly sceptical about centralisation. The communitarian who was a natural loner. The radical who was temperamentally conservative. The patriot who wanted to turn English society upside down. He was a born contrarian and it is partly his sheer cussed and multilayered individuality that continues to make reading him so fascinating.

When you do read Orwell you get a very strong impression of an entire personality. It is sometimes cranky and even objectionable (his homophobic sneering at ‘nancy poets’, for example) but there is also a generosity of spirit, emotional inhibition mixed with an understated but nonetheless real warmth. A dry yet very funny sense of humour. He detests orthodoxy of all kinds - including the orthodoxies of the avowedly unorthodox. Decent and decency are words which recur throughout Orwell’s work, almost as incantations, and there is something fundamentally decent about him. He retains a touching faith in the wisdom of ordinary people and is instinctively on the side of the oppressed.

Orwell’s life was so eventful and productive that it is easy to forget how short it was. He was just 46 when he died. The final pages of this book are unbearably sad. Having spent much of his life in relative obscurity, and on the margins of poverty, Orwell was suddenly famous and wealthy. He was also confined to a hospital bed and dying of TB.

Crick’s anti-psychological approach can sometimes be frustrating. Orwell is certainly a suitable subject for psychological analysis and there are times when you long for Crick to make a bold assertion about his motives in a given situation. What you tend to get, instead, is equivocation. Still, politics rather than psychology was Crick’s thing, and Orwell was essentially a political writer, so biographer and subject are in that vital respect well matched. This eminently readable biography enlarged my understanding of Orwell’s work and should be read by anyone seriously interested in this great writer and extraordinary man.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still by far the best Orwell biography. DJ Taylor's is too slight. Jeffrey Meyers - an American - has more facts, but can't get over his urge to piss over everything like a poorly-trained puppy.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine, approving review by the Hitch himself: http://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-...

[Jarvo · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read this within a few years of it first coming out and found it a frustrating experience. As a younger reader I was interested in the stuff I'd read, roughly speaking things written from 'Homage to Catalonia' onwards. This book takes a long time to get there, but second time round it is, perhaps, this part of the journey that holds most interest. For it takes a long time to find his voice as a writer, and this process is depicted with great care and insight.
Orwell was clearly a singular man, eccentric, workaholic and singularly resistant to fashion. He was not a man to get carried away by theories, and he is well served by his biographer, who refuses to give too much space to speculation. Inevitably there are aspects of Orwell's life that don't sit well with a contemporary audience, notably some casual homophobia and a tendency to propose to every woman he meets following the death of his first wife. But notwithstanding it is a remarkable life, determined to make his way as a writer to the extent that he neglects his health, and ultimately rewarded with some of the most widely read literary works of the C20th.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a high opinion of Orwell before I started on this biography but my estimation is now a little higher having finished this very gentle sympathetic account of his life .

What comes out about Orwell , and this you get from the observations of the many who knew him , is his quirkiness and his kindliness. To use a truism he was very «  human « . He was a « one off «  A man of integrity . This is displayed in many many small ways .

In no particular order . Things that struck me :

1. he wrote diaries occasionally that simply listed out the days events in chronology, and descriptions that listed out the «  objects «  in a room factually . So his account of the days events at his final UCH location - a private room .

«  daily routine
7 am temperature taken
730 blanket bath Bed made Shaving water. Etc etc

Then ;

Room has : Wash basin , cupboard , bedside locker .... etc etc

2. People reported how gentle he was in person and manner versus how fiery he could be in print

3. Continuously smoking
4. His writing more important than anything else even his wife. And his wife understands this
5. He struggles for money his entire life and only has wealth in his final year when he is bed bound and unable to spend it .
6. His love of birds, of nature , his closeness to animals
7. occasional glint of sadism - he disembowels an adder
8. His obsessive desire to remarry after Eileen dies in 1945. He asks somebody he has met once before to Marry him
9. His dying wish - no memorial service , no biography , many of his books to be removed from publication
10. His many many friends
11. His adoption of the working and lower classes as a group whose interests he defends through out his life
12. His great and modest bravery in Spain fighting in the civil war in 1936-7
13. Most obviously his quite electrifying writing style that speaks so directly - the opening lines of Homage to Catalonia are a fine example
14. He marries Sonia his second wife in October 1949. He is now in hospital UCH London dying of tuberculosis. He marries in hospital. He sports a purple velvet smoking jacket for his wedding.He is too ill to attend the reception.
15. He and Sonia and Richard his son are planning to leave for Switzerland for a cure at the end of January 1950. He dies on January 21 of a haemorrhage.

I was very sad to finish this biography

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Bernard Crick displays a remarkable knowledge of the English left wing intellectual circles frequented by his subject George Orwell during the 1930s and 1940s. Combining this knowledge with in-depth research Crick presents an image of Orwell that differs greatly from the one formed from a naive reading of Orwell's works.
Orwell's novels and essays give the reader the impression that he grew up in "genteel poverty" and was miserable at boarding school. Crick insists that Orwell's family in fact lived comfortably and that he was reasonably happy during his school years. One might surmise reading "Animal Farm" or "1984" that Orwell was on the political right. In fact Orwell was a socialist writing primarily for left-wing periodicals (Adelphi and Tribune) and publishing his books with Victor Gollancz a firm focussed on promoting socialism. Crick does however concur with the reader of "Burmese Days" who feels that Orwell was a staunch anti-imperialist.
Crick situates Orwell within precision in the English socialist community. Orwell was never an orthodox Marxist but for many years he was close to the ILP (Independent Labour Party) a fringe group within the Labour Party. (When the ILP left the mainstream Labour Party in 1932 it promptly lost 75% of its membership. Its last three Members of Parliament lost their seats in the elections of 1948).
During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell at the recommendations of his friends in the ILP enrolled in the militia of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) which was controlled by Trotskyites. Orwell was sympathetic to anarchists in Spain but he was never a member of their organization.
According to Crick Orwell assumed when writing "Animal Farm" that his readers would all be radical English leftists. He expected that his target audience would see "Animal Farm" as the story of a failed revolution. Instead he attracted a large number of right-wing readers from countries around the world who saw "Animal Farm" rather as a satire showing how socialist revolutionaries become corrupt once in power. Victor Gollancz his publisher realizing how the public would react to it, refused "Animal Farm" forcing Orwell to publish with Secker and Warburg.
Crick argues also that Orwell misjudged how "1984" would be interpreted. Orwell believed that left-wing intellectuals would see "1984" as a warning about what was happening in Russia. The majority of his readers, however, saw it as prophetic or dystopian novel. "1984" was enthusiastically received by right wing and centrist readers but not by those on the left.
The final chapters of Crick's book are very touching. In this section, he shows the courage and stoicism of Orwell when his wife dies unexpectedly in 1945 months after adopting a baby boy. Then Orwell's chronic tuberculosis takes a turn for the worse and he dies in 1949.

[Pippa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have huge admiration for Orwell and he must have been an incredible man, but unfortunately this biography is rather dull.

[Craig Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell, titled George Orwell: A Life, was originally published in 1982 and was the first biography to be written with the cooperation of Orwell’s widow.

This new edition, scheduled to be released on May 30, 2019, continues to show the increase of interest in Orwell and his writings, no doubt due, at least in part, to the current political climate around the world. A lot of people are feeling as if we are seeing Orwellian politics at work in our systems of government and that makes reading work by or about Orwell seem almost comforting in its prescience.

Bernard Crick’s writing, while seeming often archaic, betrays a unique understanding of the man Orwell, and spares no expense in attempting to communicate that insight to the reader.

George Orwell: A Life gets five stars for being a meticulous, well-presented biography, and any student of Orwell would do well do pick up this new edition.

https://youtu.be/pwRajVoP7gE

[Bex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, this biography is masterful. Sir Bernard Crick explores George Orwell's life and character to an outstanding degree of detail. Although Orwell requested that a biography never be written about him, this text paints a picture of him as a complex introverted man with great integrity in his life and work. I was a fan of Orwell before, but now I am captivated - I cannot recommend 'George Orwell: A Life' enough and would encourage all types of readers to pick it up.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this text in exchange for an honest review.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A detailed and informative biography of Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell, whose books I have generally enjoyed even though the author himself thought many were not much good! A great shame that his health issues led to an early death at the relatively young age of 47 when he could have written so much more. I have recently re-read '1984' and, following on from this, am going to finish reading those of his books I haven't read so far plus re-reading Animal Farm, which I first studied at school for O-level in 1972! An interesting read - 7/10.

[Luis Miguel]

Imprescindible para aquellos interesados en Orwell como hombre, escritor o ambos (como es mi caso); aunque mejor abordarla después de leer su obra (al menos una parte).
No leo muchas biografías, y no tengo criterio para saber cómo de buena es esta. En cualquier caso, a mí me ha servido para aprender y comprender ciertas cosas.
He leído la edición en español.

[Phil Stubbington · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sunday Times describes it as the definitive biography and I completely agree! An incredible piece of work - the amount of research Bernard Crick undertook is awe inspiring and his writing is excellent too.

[Dominic · Rating 4 out of 5]

The name "Orwell" is more closely associated with dystopia visions of the future than with a man who lived and breathed. Ever since the publication of 1984, we've used the term "Orwellian" to describe suffocating oppression in totalitarian regimes. Yet, George Orwell's life and political philosophy was more than a condemnation of totalitarianism, as notable as that condemnation was. Bernard Crick's biography of Orwell - the first of its kind when it was published in 1980 - attempts to understand the man and his works. 

Prof. Bernard Crick was a scholar and political theorist, and this book reads as such. This book is not a "popular" biography of Orwell. Crick is less interested in telling a "story" about Orwell than he is in uncovering the truth about Orwell's life. He relies heavily on Orwell's letters to his contemporaries and his political essays to try to piece together what Orwell believed and when. All this can make the book a bit intimidating to readers less familiar with the world of mid-20th century British intellectuals. 

That said, Crick's approach allows him to convincingly dispel common myths about Orwell. For example, many scholars and teachers - including mine my 7th grade English teacher - claim Animal Farm represents Orwell's disillusionment with socialism. However, Crick shows that Orwell never gave up his leftist ideals. Rather, Animal Farm reflected his frustration with the communists' betrayal of the revolution. Crick points to a specific incident that Orwell witnessed during the Spanish Civil War in which Communist fighters attacked other leftists who had wanted to prioritize economic reform ahead of the war effort. 

Orwell's 1984 was published more than 70 years ago, in June 1949. That one book has tended to overshadow the rest of Orwell's intellectual legacy. Bernard Crick's biography is a good place to start for readers interested in better understanding the depth and breadth of Orwell's life and literary works. 

[Brigi]

I feel like I deserve a little 'hallelujah' for finishing this book. It's not the first biography on Orwell I've read, so I have a bit of experience. I must say the first half (sadly, not the one I needed) was more interesting.

I had the impression that Crick inserted many unimportant details, events from Orwell's life. I mean, yes, they might have been interesting for someone living in that period who knew the other journalists/writers, but I think for today's man they don't seem essential.

However, it might have been just me, as I am reading with a clear purpose for my thesis: what influenced Orwell in writing 1984. Sadly, there were only hints about this (and those were mostly political too). It's also interesting to see how much new information surfaced for the newer biographies (for example Gordon Bowker's contains more letters).

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent enough book, but has some major flaws in my humble opinion. Of course, I’m not typically a reader of long biographies.

The book definitely worked to give a decent overview of his life and some of the finer details that are little known are illuminated wonderfully. However, the author dwells for far too long on certain details that I found less interesting or irrelevant.

[Vasil Kolev · Rating 4 out of 5]

He clearly was able to do a lot with the information he found, but I still found the book somewhat lacking and overdone at some parts. Still, it's very helpful to put Orwell's writings into some context (that you can't find in the Complete Works).

[Bob Waring · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive, informed and humane

For the Orwell aficionado a delight, otherwise a splendid invitation, well furnished with enticing extracts from his works. It has sent me back to the source with appetite refreshed.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good biography of Orwell, one that provides what is still the best analysis of his politics.

[JoséMaría BlancoWhite · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many unnecessary details, tedious and unfocused.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exhaustively researched biography that takes the life of an incredibly interesting writer and turns it into a tedious slog. Crick knows his stuff though.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of us have read, or are at least familiar with, George Orwell’s books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. We know him to be a critic and satirist of control by centralized government and of totalitarian abuse of power. Most of us, I fear, know little else about him - his life and experiences, his larger body of written works (novels, essays, reviews), his commitment to democratic socialism and his undying patriotism, his devotion to finding a way to write artfully while maintaining a sense of political core values and messages.

Bernard Crick’s biography of Eric Blair/George Orwell provides a thorough picture of Orwell’s development and life works. We follow Blair (not yet Orwell) from his ‘upper-upper-middle-class’ boyhood, into public school, through Eton College, as a policeman in British colonial Burma, as an aspiring writer who pursues his wish to deeply understand the lower classes (‘tramping’ with tramps and living in simple town housing while writing, but earning nearly nothing in London and Paris), developing his sense of political commitment, joining the Spanish revolution with those opposed to the fascist government, working as a journalist back in England, and, always writing about his experiences in novels and essays, and, finally, building an audience and earnings sufficient to carry him through to the end of his life.

Of particular interest to me is Orwell’s own clarity about a critical turning point in his written work (Crick cites Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Why I Write”): “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I know where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” (p. 355). Among these works are included his book-length description of his own experiences in Spain during the civil war, Homage to Catalonia, as well as those best-known works, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eight-Four. Orwell continued, in his essay, saying “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing … if it were not also an aesthetic experience.” (https://www.orwelfoundation.com/the-o...).

It is this lifelong attempt to balance seemingly competing values, across many domains, that Crick highlights in his own summary about the importance and hope of Orwell’s work for us all:
“In striving to keep a deliberate balance between public and private values, between creative work and necessary labour, between politics and culture, Orwell’s life and his writings should both guide and cheer us. He hated the power-hungry, exercised intelligence and independence, and taught us again to use our language with beauty and clarity, sought for and practised fraternity and had faith in the decency, tolerance and humanity of the common man. And what is even more heartening, he was all that and yet as odd in himself and as varied in his friends as man can be.” (p. 705)

In my opinion, the particular strength of Crick’s work lies in his method, the essence of which he captures in this comment (p. 40): “Alas indeed, the only life one can write about is the life someone actually led in reaction to actual events in a particular ‘evil time’, not about ’true character’. Otherwise biography descends into psycho-drama, …” Throughout, Crick provides clear references to Orwell’s own words, the documented observations and characterizations offered by others about Orwell and the events of his life. Whenever offering a notion of ‘what was Orwell thinking’ or ‘what really occurred,’ Crick provides us the quotes and citations both supporting and challenging his own judgments as he draws any conclusions. This compulsive data-citing will feel to some readers as, perhaps, a weakness of Crick’s writing, as well - in that his academic thoroughness sometimes prevents the biography from taking on the smooth, engaging story-feeling of so many well-received biographies of our day. In the end, I’m appreciative of Crick’s style and consistency throughout.

I admire George Orwell. I feel much better informed about his life and the “actual events in a particular ‘evil time’" through which he lived it. I very much appreciate the thorough and informative biography Bernard Frick has provided to us.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent biography of the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (you learn in the book that the latter novel's title was NOT "1984"). It covers his personal and professional lives equally well, along with an analysis of his writings, while avoiding speculation and psychoanalysis. There are extensive excerpts of Orwell's letters and journalism, along with the writings of others. Orwell (real name Eric Blair) is best known today as the author of the two novels mentioned above, but he had an extensive writing career for a man who died in his 40s, including many reviews and commentaries, many related to politics. Orwell's political convictions as an anti-imperial, anti-Communist committed socialist were a great influence on his writing and this aspect of Orwell's work is well developed as the principle theme of the biography. There is a long quote from Orwell that appears at the end of the biography that summarizes the relationship between Orwell's politics and writing better than I ever could, so I will include it here:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

Orwell's commitment to his political causes was not limited to writing, as outlined in the book. His early experiences with the police in Burma went a long way toward the formation of his hostility to British colonialism. He went on to fight on behalf of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and searched for ways to become involved in the fight against Nazi Germany, despite ill health. When he sought to examine the lives of the downtrodden and the working class, he lived among his subjects, rather than observing them from afar. The biography has made me interested in reading some of Orwell's earlier work, mostly unknown to the many readers of his two famous novels. But much of his other work is also enduring, and this accomplished biography does a great job of keeping Orwell's spirit alive.

A great, carefully researched, thoughtfully written biography. I highly recommend it.

[Dierregi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve never belonged to the Orwell cult - just a mild admirer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that satire everyone insists on treating as scripture. Still, the man’s life promised drama, so I opened Crick’s monument of a biography. His expertise is undeniable, but some chapters read like a paper chase through every scrap of evidence Orwell ever touched. The early sections, stuffed with quotations from Such, Such Were the Joys - which I haven’t read - felt more like an academic endurance test than a biography. Clearly meant for readers who already live inside Orwell’s head. Casual visitors need not apply.

Things improve once Eric Blair escapes childhood misery and begins performing the role he wrote for himself: the guilty, privileged boy seeking purification through hardship. He hurled himself toward the downtrodden with missionary zeal, harvesting material for books that - let’s face it - no one much bought. Then Spain happened. In Catalonia, he got a close look at the Stalinists’ cheerful appetite for purging their own allies. He returned a changed man and, very slowly, produced the only two books that paid the rent: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both aimed squarely at totalitarian fantasies in all their dreary varieties.

Offstage, the myth looks less noble. Orwell married Eileen, dragged her through rustic deprivation and war-torn London while she was chronically ill, and adopted a child in the middle of it all. When he finally managed to reach Europe as a correspondent in 1945, he left her behind - and she died during surgery soon after. His reputation with women has not aged well, and Crick’s valiant attempts at defense don’t solve much.

His last years on Jura were a romantic exile only if you ignore the TB, the chain-smoking, and the sister doing most of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Orwell proposed to women with the briskness of a man shopping for the classic trifecta: nurse, housekeeper, bed companion. He married Sonia Brownell four months before dying, and left her everything, having relied heavily on his sister until the end.

In sum, a champion of contradictions: the privileged boy raging against privilege; the anti-imperialist who thought poverty tourism might topple the Empire; the husband inattentive to a dying wife; the brother content to inherit care and bequeath nothing. I’ll give him one stroke of genius: the name change. George Orwell has gravitas and wisdom; Eric Blair sounds like your accountant’s nephew. But in spirit, he remained far more Blair than he ever managed to become Orwell.

[Richard Parfitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernard Crick's biography of George Orwell is measured, thoughtful, and insightful, free of the sensationalism that has characterised other efforts. Written with the cooperation of Orwell's widow and with a wide range of insights, it is a truly complete story of the author's life.

Orwell is an author who stirs up passions in some readers, even before they start to take in the actual content. Critics from the left see a patronising Etonian, attacking true socialists for sins that he doesn't understand. Critics from the right see just another lefty, often attacking his own country for affording him the privileges that allowed him to become a writer in the first place.

Crick's work is mercifully free of such preconceptions. He deals, subtly, with Orwell's politics and writings and maps out the changes in his views as evolution rather than betrayal, recognising that vague sentiments often crystallize into more clarified worldviews. From his Henley childhood to Eton, Myanmar, Wigan, Spain, and back to Britain, Crick successfully conveys the different ideas and experiences that influences Orwell's writing.

Crick is at his best when interrogating the parallels between Orwell's life and his characters. His strength is that he doesn't do so in a crude way. He sees, clearly, parts of Keep the Aspidistra Flying that reflect Orwell's experiences as a struggling writer. At the same time, he questions the parallels drawn by others between Orwell's suffering with TB towards the end of his life and the bleak vision of the future presented in 1984.

At times, Crick is offputtingly uncharitable about Orwell's earlier writings. He gives the impression that only three of Orwell's books were worthwhile works of literature. The sections on Orwell's early life, too, gives rather a lot of credit to Eton for influences that aren't always clear. That aside, compared to other biographies, this is free of sensationalist claims or random speculation.

Overall, well worth a read for someone interested in the life of one our most important authors.

[George1st · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being originally published in 1982 Bernard Crick's masterful biography of this most enigmatic of writers remains the definitive account of Orwell's life and works. Unfortunately the biography was published after I had read his books and so for many years I laboured under a number of misconceptions and misinterpretations concerning some fundamental aspects of his writing. With the co-operation of his widow and with meticulous research which included interviews with many of those who were still alive who knew him the reader will obtain a further greater appreciation of both the man and the writer and an understanding how Orwell made the political journey from "Tory anarchist" to democratic socialist with an abiding loathing of totalitarianism whether of the right or left.

The biography despite its wealth of detail is most readable and emphasis both Orwell's prodigious work ethic and the sheer volume of the work he produced which included journalism, essays, novels and non-fiction books. This is sometimes forgotten as most people when they think of Orwell immediately and often exclusively think of his last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight Four. Orwell had a fascinating life which included his time as a policeman in Burma, living the life of a down and out and fighting in the Spanish Civil War. But above all it is his writing that predominates and shines throughout this biography and he is rightly compared to Swift. Orwell's writing style is both simple and subtle and is invariably lucid.

Crick presents a political perspective on Orwell's life and work and has concentrated on the facts taking care to avoid speculation unless if unavoidable. Orwell's last book was written as a warning which is just as relevant today as when it was written and the republication of this important biography comes at a welcome time for those of us who share some of his beliefs and concerns.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a brave author to directly contradict Orwell's last request that no biography be written about him, but we should all be very thankful Crick took up the gauntlet!

His biography of Orwell's life is one of the most insightful and thoroughly researched I've read ; bringing highlights of his letters and essays together with personal recollections from friends and Crick's own analysis of some of the more troubling aspects of an extraordinary life.

It's balance of describing the political and personal endear it to both fans of Orwell looking for detail on his ideas and what shaped them , but also to the more casual reader who perhaps is newer or unfamiliar with his works.

The only area in which I feel Crick lets this great book down slightly is a tendency to try and justify some of the more uncomfortable moments of Orwell's life - for example troubling stories about his almost assault of a female acquaintance, or references to violent tendencies. Whether these occurred as described or not, the author does lean towards immediately discounting or trying to justify them , when it could be better left to the readers own analysis.

However, this remains an undisputed must - read for anyone with an interest in the life and ideology of one of the 21st Century's literary giants at any level of prior acquaintance.

[Peter Hoopman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in this summer (2O2O), Orwell had almost become a mythical person in my mind. Was he an existing figure ?! With Che Guevarra for me this was even worse, I realy doubted if he was actually a man of flesh and blood and not only a print on a T-shirt expressing the need of a utopian real world. So yes I started to read the biography by Bernard Crick to find out whether Orwel was as real as I was interpretating him only from hear saying, films documentaries articles and that’s it. From Orwel to Eric Blair, at start I had some hesitations, how can he (Bernard Crick) say that, what does he realy know about Eric Blair? I and/or Bernard Crick was jumping to conclusions, or worse “judging”. Going on reading the biography, I loved it, probably because it was not glamorous it stays as good as possible to the facts, to what the writer could find back as tangible traceable. Somehow this helped in the end to make Orwell as real as he has been.

Probably what kept on hanging is the idea of common decency and how far (for myself) have we drifted of generally or hierarchally speaking ?! Knowing, seeing and understanding this quite a bit, Orwell had an inner compass through which he could see the world and its functioning a bit more than average men and this makes him a very interesting person to discover and appreciate knowing simply that one is not alone in this. 😊

[Peter Vegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biography of a passionate man and writer but overall a pretty average (read: fallible) human who worked himself to death out of guilt, money worries, and perfectionism.

I like how the biographer merely based himself on the actual evidence and didn't go and embellish or write around the absence of evidence. As a consequence, most here seems to talk about his eccentricities, mistakes, ... and less about redeeming qualities he may or may not have possessed. So the portrait that was painted here at times feels a bit 2D, but probably that's an accurate portrayal of someone who has always claimed to live in the service of his writing and in doing so seems to have neglected (to a certain degree) family, friends, love, health.

But in fairness, it's easy to criticize from our times, writing from a comfortable home. Orwell (or Blair) was of course also a man of his times who experienced trauma at school, empire, poverty, wars, TB, the threat of being annihilated by totalitarianism, ... Despite all these pressures, he managed to keep a sense of optimism (through his socialist beliefs) and humor (with his signature writing style of "gaiety and grimness"). So I reckon he was a great man but also a man of his times - who didn't manage to escape from certain traps in his own life as he did in his writing.