Anyone wishing to know George Orwell better need only leaf through the masterpieces of literature he left behind. The plight of poverty exposed in Down and Out in Paris and London was his own; his contempt for communism saw the Russian Revolution turned into a barnyard drama in Animal Farm; and the haunting pictures of a dystopian future in Nineteen Eighty-Four had been painted as his warning of totalitarianism.
Orwell loathed imperialism, rejected a bourgeois lifestyle, and longed – even fought – for socialist revolution. And that is all there in painfully personal detail on the pages of his works.