"Ben" Yair’s Reviews > Why Orwell Matters > Status Update

"Even more than the deceptively simple question of his ‘Englishness’, Orwell’s posthumous standing as a representative of truth-telling, objectivity and verification continues to keep his ideas in play."

-Hitchens , Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"In his lifetime, Orwell never ceased to apologize for his shortcomings as a writer of fiction. And at his death, he directed his executors to ensure that at least two of his novels — A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying — were not republished."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

‘"Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining . . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.’ Of this splendid piece of aristocratic callousness Orwell commented in his diary that ‘apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist’. England, whose England?"

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"The final American reference I can find is in a letter to Astor very near the end, in July 1949, in which Orwell asks: ‘Have you read “The Naked and The Dead”? It’s awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet.’ Here is another brief frustrating glimpse of a potentially fruitful engagement that never quite matured."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"Thus, the survivors of the Ukrainian famine, and the purges, and the Nazi invasion and the war, and the subsequent extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe, were able to decipher the meaning of the pigs (and of the name Napoleon) without any undue difficulty, a task of interpretation that had defeated conservatism’s most deft and subtle literary critic."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:"

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"That one or two of these latter were public-school types who had learned to distrust the idea of ‘team spirit’ need not surprise anybody; the First World War had already produced a small but vital group of conscientious junior officers who ‘saw through’ jingoism and class allegiance in almost precisely the same way, and by dint of equally bitter experience."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"It might not be too much to say that the clarity and courage of Orwell’s prose, which made him so readily translatable for Poles and Ukrainians, also played a part in making English a non-imperial lingua franca."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.

"Thus, the Orwell who is regarded by some as being as English as roast beef and warm beer is born in Bengal and publishes his first articles in French."

-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters.