Orwell

Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of scurity, D.J.Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unwordliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth an gentleness, disillusiontment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century.