Vol. 25 No. 12 dated 19 June 2003
Reach-Me-Down Romantic
Terry Eagleton
George Orwell by Gordon Bowker | Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00
Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor | Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00
Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas | Haus, 180 pp, £8.99
"Like D.H. Lawrence, Orwell divides his readership down the middle. In Lawrence's case, either you feel that he has a depth and intensity which puts every other writer in the shade, or his male supremacism and mystical ravings make you want to throw up. It is not surprising that similar ferocious contentions have surrounded a man who was at once traditionally English and politically revolutionary, rather as there would be unavoidable controversy over an animal which had the rib-cage of a hippo and the snout of a badger." http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/eagl01_.html