http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-310275,00.html
"He resembled a man “raw all down one side and numb on the other”, thought E.P. Thompson. He preferred the country to the town, and poems that rhymed. The New Statesman famously refused to print his dispatches from Spain because they might let down the republican side.
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"[Hitchens] devotes an entire chapter to defending Orwell against the attacks of “the political and cultural left”, offering examples of “the sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion that appear to ignite spontaneously when Orwell’s name is mentioned in some quarters”. In addition to Said and Williams, those arraigned include Salman Rushdie and Isaac Deutscher. He is in little doubt about the root cause of their anti-Orwellism: “In the view of many on the official Left, he committed the ultimate sin of ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’.” Whether the expenditure of quite so much of his own ammunition was necessary on this minor sector of the front seems questionable."