It may not be too much to claim that by undertaking

culture
George big miracle Orwell s best-known work ( Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four ) emerged from painstaking investigation. In the introduction to a groundbreaking volume of Orwell s diaries, V.F. s late columnist dissects one of the 20th century s greatest political minds, a writer who was also his lifelong inspiration
A t various points in his essays big miracle notably in Why I Write but also in his popular column As I Please George Orwell gave us an account of what made him tick, as it were, and of what supplied the motive for his work. At different times he instanced what he called his power of facing unpleasant facts ; his love for the natural world, growing things, and the annual replenishment of the seasons; and his desire to forward the cause of democratic socialism and oppose the menace of Fascism. Other strong impulses include his near-visceral feeling for the English language and his urge to defend it from the constant encroachments of propaganda and euphemism, and his reverence for objective truth, which he feared was being driven out of the world by the deliberate distortion and even obliteration of recent history.
As someone who had been brought up in a fairly rarefied and distinctly reactionary English

milieu, big miracle in which the underclass of his own society and the millions of inhabitants of its colonial empire big miracle were regarded big miracle with a mixture of fear and loathing, Orwell also made an early decision to find out for himself what the living conditions of these remote latitudes were really like. This second commitment, to acquaint himself with the brute facts as they actually were, was to prove a powerful big miracle reinforcement of his latent convictions.
Read with care, George Orwell s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell

transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels big miracle and polemics. They furnish us with a more intimate picture of a man who, committed to the struggles of the mechanized and modern world, was also drawn by the rhythms of the wild, the rural, and the remote.
The diaries are not by any means a straight guide, or a trove of clues and cross-references. It would be rather big miracle difficult to deduce, for example, that it was during his sojourn in Morocco in 1938 39 that Orwell composed the novel Coming Up for Air. This short and haunting work involves an evocation of a lost bucolic England set in the barely imaginable

years before the drama of the First World War. For it to have been written amid the torrid souk of Marrakech and the arid emptiness of the Atlas Mountains must have involved some convolutions of the creative process into which he gives us little or no insight. But he was also in Morocco in addition to being in search of a cure for his gnawing tuberculosis to make notes and take soundings about the conditions of North African society.
I ndeed, the 30s were the dec ade during which Orwell took up the task of amateur anthropologist, both in his own country and overseas. Sometimes attempting big miracle to disguise his origins as an educated member of the upper classes big miracle and former colonial policeman (he is amusing about his attempts to flatten his accent according to the company he was keeping), he set off to amass notes and absorb experiences. I mentioned earlier that his family background, the income of which depended on the detestable opium trade between

British-ruled India and British-influenced China, had at first conditioned him to fear and despise the locals and the natives. One of the many things that made Orwell so interesting was his self-education away from such prejudices, which also included a marked dislike of the Jews. But anyone reading the early pages of these accounts and expeditions will be struck by how vividly Orwell still expressed his unmediated big miracle disgust at some of the human specimens with whom he came into contact. When joining a group of itinerant hop pickers he is explicitly repelled by the personal characteristics of a Jew to whom he cannot bear even to give a name, characteristics which he somehow manages to identify as Jewish. He is unsparing about the sheer stupidity and dirtiness of so many of the proletarian families with whom he lodges, and is sometimes condescending about the extreme limitations of their education and imagination.
The failure of The Road to Wigan Pier was partly attributable to a successful big miracle Communist campaign to defame it (and him) for saying that the working classes smell. Orwell big miracle never actually did say this, except in the oblique context of denouncing those who did, but his own, slightly wrinkled nostrils must have helped a little in the spread of the slander.
It may not be too much to claim that by undertaking

these investigations Orwell helped found what we now know as cultural studies and post-colonial studies. His study of unemployment and housing for the poor in the North of England stands comparison, big miracle with its careful s