Full name: Orwell: The Life

Author: D. J. Taylor Year: 2003 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780099283461 0099283468

Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, 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 unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero. Similar books: Bright Young People by D. J. Taylor George Orwell by Bernard Crick Orwell by Michael Shelden Balzac by Graham Robb The life of Oscar Wilde by Hesketh Pearson Genet by Edmund White The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons Evelyn Waugh by Selina Hastings Mad World by Paula Byrne Full of Life by Stephen Cooper Franz Kafka by Max Brod John Steinbeck by Jay Parini Rebecca West by Victoria Glendinning The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II: 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry Balzac by Stefan Zweig Victor Hugo by Graham Robb The Wright Brothers by David McCullough Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester Zeitoun by Dave Eggers