Essays

This outstanding collection brings together Orwell’s longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes ‘My Country Right or Left’, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, 'Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’.

With great originality and wit Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from the moral enormity of Jonathan Swift’s strange genius and a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, a comic yet profound discussion of naughty sea-side picture postcards and a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose style, Orwell’s essays challenge, move and entertain.
Contains:

1. Why I Write

2. The Spike

3. A Hanging

4. Shooting An Elephant

5. Bookshop Memories

6. Marrakech

7. Charles Dickens

8. Boys' Weeklies

9. Inside The Whale

10. My Country Right or Left

11. The Lion and the Unicorn

12. Wells, Hitler and the World State

13. The Art of Donald McGill

14. Rudyard Kipling

15. Looking Back on the Spanish War

16. W. B. Yeats

17. Poetry and the Microphone

19. Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

20. Raffles and Miss Blandish

21. Arthur Koestler

22. Antisemitism in Britain

23. In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse

24. Notes on Nationalism

25. Good Bad Books

26. The Sporting Spirit

27. Nonsense Poetry

28. The Prevention of Literature

29. Books v. Cigarettes

30. Decline of the English Murder

31. Politics and the English Language

32. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

33. A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray

34. Confessions of a Book Reviewer

35. Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels

36. How the Poor Die

37. Riding Down from Bangor

38. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

39. Such, Such Were the Joys

40. Writers and Leviathan

42. Reflections on Gandhi