George Orwell provides a vivid and unflinching portrayal of working-class life in Northern England during the 1930s. Through his own experiences and meticulous investigative reporting, Orwell exposes the harsh living conditions, poverty, and social injustices faced by coal miners and other industrial workers in the region. He documents their struggles with unemployment, poor housing, and inadequate healthcare, as well as the pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair that permeates their lives. In the second half of the The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell delves into the complexities of political ideology, as he grapples with the shortcomings of both socialism and capitalism in addressing the needs of the working class. GEORGE ORWELL was born in India in 1903 and passed away in London in 1950. As a journalist, critic, and author, he was a sharp commentator on his era and its political conditions and consequences.

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting for the POUM militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it." The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, when it appeared with an influential preface by Lionel Trilling. The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948. A French translation by Yvonne Davet-with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes-in 1938-39, was not published until five years after Orwell's death. Book Summary: Orwell served as a private, a corporal (cabo) and-when the informal command structure of the militia gave way to a conventional hierarchy in May 1937-as a lieutenant, on a provisional basis, in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. In June 1937, the leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation, and Orwell was consequently forced to flee. Having arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, Orwell told John McNair, the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) representative there, that he had "come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that "he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'-by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984. As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line." With an Introduction from Keith Gessen.

This is a dystopian social science fiction novel and morality tale. The novel is set in the year 1984, a fictional future in which most of the world has been destroyed by unending war, constant government monitoring, historical revisionism, and propaganda. The totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party and known as Airstrip One, now includes Great Britain as a province. The Party uses the Thought Police to repress individuality and critical thought. Big Brother, the tyrannical ruler of Oceania, enjoys a strong personality cult that was created by the party's overzealous brainwashing methods. Winston Smith, the main character, is a hard-working and skilled member of the Ministry of Truth's Outer Party who secretly despises the Party and harbors rebellious fantasies.

Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --