Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of George Orwell
Selected Essays
Shooting an elephant (1936)
Inside the whale (1940)
Charles Dickens (1940)
Boys' weeklies (1940)
The art of Donald McGill (1941)
Wells, Hitler and the world state (1941)
Rudyard Kipling (1942)
Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
In defence of P.G. Wodehouse (1945)
Notes on nationalism (1945)
The prevention of literature (1946)
Decline of the English murder (1946)
Politics and the English language (1946)
Confessions of a book reviewer (1946)
Why I write (1946)
Politics vs literature: an examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
How the poor die (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Writers and Leviathan (1948)
Explanatory Notes

About the Author

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature. After degrees at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex before moving to a post in the Faculty in 1986. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals, and an occasional broadcaster.