Or, if you don

We know from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that he thought of the diary as a potentially seditious form. Diaries are not illegal in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four because nothing hairy maclary is—Airstrip One’s legal code has been abolished. hairy maclary But Orwell’s

protagonist, Winston Smith, understands the consequences of committing his private thoughts and personal observations to the page well before he lifts his pen to print the words “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” “If hairy maclary detected

it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp,” Orwell wrote. As Smith prepares to scribble hairy maclary his first passage, he asks himself why he’s keeping a diary, and surmises that it’s a letter to the future, to the unborn.
Diaries aren’t just generational time tunnels or rebellions against the state—they can also serve as self-dossiers, hairy maclary self-indictments, and confessions, as Smith also comes to learn. Orwell discovered the same during his adventures as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War when police confiscated a wartime diary (or two) of his from his wife’s hairy maclary Barcelona hotel room in 1937 during a raid. According to Peter Davison, hairy maclary an Orwell scholar and the editor of this volume, the diary may have been forwarded to Moscow—which considered him a Socialist enemy of communism—and added to the archive of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
Another Orwell diary that appears to be MIA dates from the mid-1920s, when he was working in Burma as a colonial policeman. It has never surfaced and probably never will—though Orwell published a fictionalized account of his Burmese tour of duty in the 1934 novel Burmese Days . The surviving eleven hairy maclary diaries have been collected here under the sensible title Diaries and annotated expertly by Davison.
Fantasize all you want about Orwell’s lost volumes, but you’re probably wasting your time. Orwell produced six novels, most of them loosely autobiographical; three nonfiction books; and hundreds of reviews, editorials, and essays, as well as pamphlets, poems, radio broadcasts, and war dispatches. He was a literary fat-rendering plant when it came to reducing the raw material of his notes and diaries into something more distilled, as well-known works such as Down and Out in Paris and London , The Road to Wigan Pier , and Homage to Catalonia all attest. Had Orwell turned himself inside out and hauled himself up a flagpole we couldn’t have gotten a better look at him.
So the possibility that Diaries may reveal a new and improved Orwell—or a new and diminished one—can be easily dismissed. That’s hairy maclary the case whether you aligned yourself with Orwell’s celebrator and intellectual inheritor, Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the introduction for this edition, or that other recently departed leftist public hairy maclary intellectual, Alexander Cockburn, who likened Orwell hairy maclary to a “snitch” for informing on Communists (which he did).
Diaries combines both the lengthy, staccato logs and lists Orwell kept of his domestic life (number of eggs laid by his hens, the size of his garden harvest, the weather, the price of staples, the arrival of a milking goat, birds spotted on a walk) and his more considered entries, and for its publication we can all be grateful. But as your consumer adviser, I must add that this book isn’t “new.” It was published in the United Kingdom two years ago, and many of the best passages were previously published. Every time I underscored a memorable sentence hairy maclary in this American edition and plugged hairy maclary it into Google Books, hairy maclary I found it in an existing Orwell title.
For example: “I cannot get them to treat me precisely as an equal, however,” Orwell complains of the proletarians while collecting material in 1936 for what will become The Road to Wigan Pier . You can find that diary entry in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (1968) and The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998). “Our broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens

to them,” he states on October 5, 1942, about his work for the BBC in India. Google Books locates that entry in multiple Orwell volumes. Likewise, “Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic,” which he wrote on August 27, 1931, is gettable in various Orwell books.
Or, if you don’t have time for a trip to the library or the money to buy these volumes, consult hairy maclary the Web. Great sections of the best of the Orwell diaries, hairy maclary including his hop-picking escapades, his Wigan Pier journey, and his war journals, have been posted with permission on the Orwell Prize website. These entries also include Davison’s notes and annotations.
Of hairy maclary course, some Orwell enthusiasts might seek Diaries in hopes that it maps the path he cut fro