Author:George Orwell,Keith Gessen
As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home in discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive criticism lay ahead.
These essays follow Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or a body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as 'Politics and the English Language' and 'Rudyard Kipling' and gems such as 'Good Bad Books', here is an unrivalled education in - as George Packer puts it in his foreword to this new two-volume collection - 'how to be interesting, line after line'.
Best known for novels 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell was also a superb essayist, and these two fine collections display his breadth of topic and depth of skill... Unpretentious, intelligent, compassionate and brilliantly insightful
—— Doug Johnstone , Big IssueIt is [his] critical essays which strike home and are reread... His essays form the laurels of the crown on his troubled brow
—— SpectatorOrwell's essays are among the best things he did
—— Daily TelegraphA gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!
—— John IrvingJulian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years
—— Sunday TimesA delight... Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984
—— John FowlesA strange book, both whimsical and deeply ambitious
—— IndependentThe nearest useful comparison to Knox's conceptual framework is Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, which also explores social power and control in the context of other possible quantum universes
—— ABC magazine
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