Coming Up for Air (Harvest Book)

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Insurance salesman George "Fatty" Bowling lives with his humorless wife and their two irritating children in a dull house in a tract development in the historyless London suburb of West Bletchley. The year is 1938; doomsayers are declaring that England will be at war again by 1941.

When George bets on an unlikely horse and wins, he finds himself with a little extra cash on his hands. What should he spend it on? "The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskeys." But a chance encounter with a poster in Charing Cross sets him off on a tremendous journey into his own memories--memories, especially, of a boyhood spent in Lower Binfield, the country village where he grew up. His recollections are pungent and detailed. Touch by touch, he paints for us a whole world that is already nearly lost: a world not yet ruled by the fear of war and not yet blighted by war's aftermath:

1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn.

Alas, George finds that even Lower Binfield has been darkened by the bomber's shadow.

Readers of 1984 will recognize Orwell's desperate insistence on the importance of the individual, of memory, of history, and of language; and they will find in Fatty Bowling one of Orwell's most engaging creations--a warm, witty, thinking, remembering Everyman in a world that is fast learning not to think and not to remember, and thus swiftly losing its mind. --Daniel Hintzsche

Book Description

George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

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The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I'd nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There's the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference- where there are no kids there's no bare patch in the middle. I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while the new ones were being made. I haven't such a bad face, really. It's one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes. I've never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I've got my teeth in I probably don't look my age, which is forty-five.

Customer Reviews:

Not his best, but better than most..........2007-10-11

This obscure novel is vintage Orwell. The candor, the honesty, the confrontation of unpleasant facts dead on...all his signature traits are deployed. He develops such a rapport with the reader, a rapport that transcends time, place, etc., that one begins to think Orwell is a dear old friend sitting next to him, and speaking in his ear.

This portrait of suburban anomie predates the countless similarly-themed, lesser works inflicted on the public by countless third-raters subsequent to World War II. Orwell is no third-rater...he clocked the mise-en-scene, and laid bare the ennui, meaninglessness, and alienation, with excellent prose, and beautiful metaphors.

I don't think this book is as well-honed as Burmese Days, but it is a memorable achievement all the same. If you are a fan of Orwell's style, this will go down like fine wine...and the aftertaste will be pleasant and lingering

the bad times are coming, and the stream-lined men are coming too........2005-12-29

perfection is this: thinking about writing an amazon book review and simultaneously coming across a line that sums up a book nearly perfectly (see title).

orwell is magical when it comes to sliding down the slippery slope with passion, terror and vigor. this book is quite different. it is slow and melodic...the tone is cozy and nostalgic with random bits of sardonic bitterness...and hardly is there a theme, but perhaps this: "everything will always be the same and everything is constantly changing."

george bowling is a middle-aged suburban wash up who hates life, lightly reminisces about his time during world war i and the beauty and purity of his long forgotten childhood. the story takes place at the onset of wwii and george decides to revisit the place where he grew up in order to "come up for air" and remember what the good life used to be.

throughout the book, he teeters between optimism and dark despair...hatred and whimsical glory...esteem and self loathing...etc. the book is entertaining with fantastic imagery and offers a single harrowing scene which might bring anyone who has not experienced the terror of war to tears. read this and you are guaranteed to laugh, smile, and get bored...but all worth it.

bravo, orwell. yet again.

Well Worth Reading, With Reservations.......2005-10-31

As seasoned readers know, your response to any work is a combination of its intrinsic merit and timing. Maybe this just wasn't the right time to read this novel. Maybe I'll come back at some future time to revisit this assessment.

It simply did not register with me as did Orwell's other, non-political fiction, including the charming Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Part of it, I believe, arises from the fact that the novel is written in the first-person, which can be limiting in that it restricts us to the narrator's vocabulary and deprives us of Orwell's magnificent facility with langauge.

Now, as to the novel's merits. George "Fatty" Bowles, who, having won 17 pounds on a horse race, decides to use his winnings to escape and reflect upon his life for a week -- or, as he puts it, "to come up for air" -- is an engaging everyman, a person in whom all we old, ossified married types see ourself, and he captures perfectly the horrible nexus between memory and desire that a man's fifth decade often is. As he visits the town of his birth to witness how time has effaced its charm, we are with him all the way. His reflection on the approaching war is both moving and memorable. Because the first world war did not happen on our shores, it's hard for us to imagine its impact on the English imagination as that nation anticipated a reprise of that horrific, generation-destroying event. Orwell captures this dreadful anticipation very convincingly.

Finally, there's this: among all the people who have ever struggled for the poor and the middle-class, Orwell seems to have struggled more earnestly, yet to have been exempt from the tendency to idealize the people he was trying to help. Bowles is no one's ideal; he's just pretty much everyone's reality. He is convincingly middle-classed.

It is, as all this indicates, a fine novel. It simply doesn't represent the author at the height of his ability.

In Search of Lost Time.......2005-10-16

George Bowling's life is pretty mundane even by his own admission: he has "settled down" into his middle age with his wife and two children, his mortgage and his steady yet uninteresting job. Frustrated, George looks back to the days of his childhood in a small town in rural England and asks where did it all go wrong? He tries to recapture those times, but can anyone really go home again?

This is a beautifully written, funny and at times poignant story. Orwell depicts (with great skill) the dangers of middle-age drift, and of trying to escape from it by revisiting a past which only exists inside your head. He takes a swipe at various irritating types (many of them still around) such as the "respectable" middle classes who believe they are living in the countryside and are protecting it when they are in fact doing neither.

It is interesting in that the feeling of decay, of falling standards seems to afflict each generation in turn. Although Bowling is careful not to idolise his past, pointing to the many faults of the society he grew up in, the novel does reveal that there is nothing new in nostalgia.

G Rodgers

Prescient musings as the world comes apart.......2004-10-22

It's a mark of great skill when an author - like George Orwell, as you may have guessed - can fit so much meaning into a story about so very little. Such is the case with Coming Up For Air. On the surface, there's not much here. In fact more than half of the book is taken up by a portly middle-aged insurance worker's reminiscences about his childhood. And it wasn't any sort of exciting childhood either, full of glory or high hopes or wretched poverty or any of the things that make life colorful for better or worse. It was a British, turn of the Century, solid lower middle class provincial childhood in a town somewhere. The narrator does this essentially on the eve of the Second World War as he goes through perhaps some sort of mid-life crisis, though that term is never used. Basically, the story can be summed up as a man trying to figure out what his life means and where it's going.

In that sense, Coming Up For Air probably has the least actual plot of any Orwell novel. But in his endless musings the reader becomes this man (George Bowling is his name, but since it's a first person narrative, it's hard to attach a name tag to the man even as we experience the world through his eyes). Orwell is, as far as the mechanics of writing goes, well into maturity here.

But beyond this sense of realism in musings and reminiscences, Orwell hits on a few themes. The more dominant one is, I suppose, the idea that you can never go home again. After extensively guiding us through his childhood, our hero decides the thing for him to do is to visit his childhood hometown, the place he hasn't been in twenty-five or so years. Naturally, everything has changed. Absolutely everything. Not for the better, or necessarily for the worse, but changed nonetheless. There is, written on top of this, a vague plot about how he's trying to keep the trip from his shrewish wife, lest she think he's cheating on her, but that is strictly secondary. Since so much of the tale is bound up in our narrator's emotional state and thoughts, there's little point in relating them here. Suffice it to say that he goes home with a clearer idea of who he is.

The other point, dwelt upon at some length, is his (and really Orwell's) thoughts on the coming war. The book was written and published just before World War Two, in 1938. If an author had written something like this in 1948, I would be tempted to knock off points for suggesting that someone could have correctly judged the scale of the coming conflict in such a way. But perhaps I would be wrong, because here is evidence that people really were expecting something big to come. This is not to say that Orwell correctly foresaw particular chronologies. He did, in fact, seem to think that Britain and the western world would have to become barbaric to defeat barbarism (hints of 1984). In this he turned out to be wrong. But as a reader born long after the conflict ended, I was amazed that something written beforehand could capture what I think of as the mood of hindsight, but in foresight. I suppose this is why Orwell is so respected as a writer and thinker.

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Why Crick Writes
A complete biography

George Orwell: A Life
Bernard Crick
Manufacturer: Little Brown & Co (T)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0316161128

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Why Crick Writes.......2003-03-25

Having been encouraged from about the age of twelve to read the essays of George Orwell I read Bernard Crick's recent meditation on him with a sense of gratitude. I haven't read any other work on Orwell which so perfectly conveys his inexhaustibility.
Crick's real achievement here is a mastery of Orwell's tone. Orwell's essays keep a reader up until dawn and this book did the same to this reader.
I can't say I agree with everything in the book, and have to say that sometimes I didn't grasp Crick's arguments. The chief pleasure of this book is its style; learned from one of the greatest defenders of expressed thought.

A complete biography.......2003-03-25

The book had every thing i was looking for. It showed his life in different episodes. It was very easy to research in it.

Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949-1950 (Complete Orwell)

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Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949-1950 (Complete Orwell)
George Orwell
Manufacturer: Secker & Warburg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0436210096
Release Date: 2002-12-10

Book Description

The final paperback volume, Volume 20, of The Complete Works of George Orwell.

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Complete but Rather Wintry.
Complete but Rather Wintry.
REVIEW OF D. J. TAYLOR'S ORWELL THE LIFE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
The best of several Orwell bipgraphies
Silly book

Orwell: The Life
D. J. Taylor
Manufacturer: Holt Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 080507693X
Release Date: 2004-09-09

Book Description

Winner of the 2004 Whitbread Prize for Biography"D. J. Taylor has written not only the best recent biography of George Orwell . . . but also one of the cleverest studies of the relationship of that life to the written word." The Washington Post Book World In the last fifty years, Animal Farm and 1984 have sold more than forty million copies, and "Orwellian" is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature, and language. D. J. Taylor's magisterial assessment cuts through George Orwell's iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 1930s and 1940s was characterized by the myths he built around himself.Drawing on previously unseen material, Orwell is a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. This biography is as vibrant, powerful, and resonant as its extraordinary subject.

Customer Reviews:

Complete but Rather Wintry. .......2007-02-26

Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.

Complete but Rather Wintry. .......2007-02-26

REVIEW OF D. J. TAYLOR'S ORWELL THE LIFE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN.......2005-04-13

This is a difficult book to categorize. It is well written, contains many interesting anecdotes, but it misses the essential Orwell.

Taylor's gloomy, otherwordly, ex-Etonian, ex-imperial policeman simply does not add up to Orwell. The sum of the parts is much less than the man. Taylor's book is a bit like an autopsy, the pathologist clearly never being able to comprehend the stiff, dead flesh and bottled samples before him as the full human being they were. Nevertheless, autopsies do tell interesting tales.

Orwell's gloomy temperament puts him not outside the mainstream of writers but exactly in the company of so many important writers. The list of writers with some form of depression, whether alcoholism or gloominess, is so huge - Greene, Swift, Hemingway, Le Carré, Dickens, Gissing, O'Neill, Twain, Faulkner, etc, etc. - one comes to think of the quality almost as a job requirement. It provides one of the special lens through which critical writers see the world. One has to believe Taylor understands this, but his book conveys only clinical observations of gloominess snipped from letters, diaries, and conversations.

As far as Orwell's otherworldliness, Orwell was clearly in the great tradition of English eccentrics, and that is an important component of his appeal. There is a long and glorious line of them from Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen down to Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford, and Vanessa Redgrave. Yet Taylor only offers clinical observations and never puts them in their proper context.

Orwell was not an important novelist, so it seems a bit gratuitous to say so as Taylor does. In fact, he wasn't even a very good novelist. Yet books like Keep the Aspadistra Flying do provide a keen sense of his Englishness. Missing entirely from Taylor's autopsy is a sense of Orwell's quintessential Englishness. When Orwell writes of getting back to the feel of heavy English coins and having mahogany tea, readers get a sense of pure distilled Englishness. This comes through also in quasi-journalistic books like The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London - important early efforts at what today might be called investigative journalism - books which Taylor rather disparages both in terms of Orwell's re-arranging actual events and being an observer mentally wearing an Eton tie.

What Orwell was is a critic, and a rather magnificent one. I am reminded of Degas' description of Monet as "Only an eye, but what an eye!"

Orwell had an exquisite sense of justice and a very sensitive barometer for tyranny plus he had the words to convey vividly his sensibilities. Taylor virtually misses this in his examination of bile and stool samples. Taylor too often puts Orwell's political criticism down to miss-directed, soft-Left thinking of an ex-Etonian. Orwell himself recognized the simpering nature of much of the Left's views, yet he struggled bravely with finding a vocabulary to accommodate his sympathies. He possibly did not come to recognize himself for what he was, a scorching critic of both Left and Right. After all, his time was short. That is how it is when you die in your forties.

He was also an important literary critic, and while Taylor recognizes this, I don't believe he gives it a full enough examination.

Taylor sadly drags out the subject of anti-Semitism, perhaps the most overly-used epithet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Orwell was anti-Semitic - and I do not believe this for a second - it was in the same vague sense of virtually all Englishmen of his time. The English have always had a degree of xenophobia, a quality whose obverse side is the very set of qualities defining Englishness. I am tired of discussions of whether Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice makes the greatest playwright in human history anti-Semitic, discussions which always ignore the human qualities and sense of justice Shakespeare gives his character, and just so, Orwell, overall a truly decent man.

There has been a good deal of writing in recent years about Orwell, much of it wrong-headed, from claims being made that he would have supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (!) to sentimentality. Little of it captures Orwell the independent and remarkably clear-thinking critic. Taylor gives us no sense of what it was that animated Orwell, other than some almost silly stuff about getting back at people like the headmistress of his school. There is almost a sense in this book of a high-class hatchet job done on Orwell, but I don't want to push that point. What makes Orwell truly important is minimized, and what wasn't important is given a good deal of weight. Perhaps that is the fate of great critics who support no one's ideologies and preconceptions.

This book should be read only with an awareness of its limited approach to the subject. This is not Orwell, but a somewhat interesting display of bits and memorabilia in museum cabinets.

Please see my review of Gordon Bowker's Orwell biography, a superior work (published in the same year) in most respects to Taylor's.

The best of several Orwell bipgraphies.......2005-04-07

I have read many biographies of Orwell before encountering this one, but have learned more about Orwell the person in this book than in all of the others combined. Taylor's insight into the man and sparkling prose style make this a must read.

Silly book.......2005-03-30

This is a book that has no reason to be.

The author appears to have two primary objectives, viz.,to exhibit how clever he is and, secondly,how awful a man and writer Orwell was.

The author is not clever;he is repetitious and snide in a schoolboy boastful manner. He is incredibly careless as a writer and editor, appears ignorant of basic grammar and rules of punctuation and mistakes coyness for principle.The reader may open the book at random for examples of these failures.

His knowledge of history one may measure by his statement that Chamberlin flew to Berlin in 1938. Again, the curious reader can find errors of this sort almost at random. Just open the book--if you must.

The more serious criticism of the book is that it is entirely a tendentious assassination of reputation. The argument of the book the author recapitulates in a chapter three quaters through, entitled "The Case Against".This apparently is for the slow learners who may have missed Taylor's derogatory points liberally supplied throughout the previous three hundred pages. In two pages and a paragraph, the author releases the proverbial cat;one understands why this text appears so late in the book. Had the author a proper sense of honest intellectual protocal, he would have announced in an introduction his purpose. So silly this is,no reader would have bothered with the book.

A ploy Taylor favors is to set forth alternative and always invidious explanations for Orwell's words and actions.If no one is at hand to quote, Taylor sets up a straw dog built from his own ever so sensitive reading, and precedes to demolish it.He makes no attempt at balance.He is utterly unpersuasive because he works so hard at being so unfair. As a deflator, he lacks subtley. One can imagine how little Orwell would have respected Taylor and how little he would have cared.

This is a mean spirited, unconvincing, and finally, unnecessary production.

The reader caring to read about Orwell has many fine alternatives, not the least meritorious of which is the Bowker life, published the same year as Taylor's spam of a study.

Orwell (Life & Times Series) (Life&Times series)

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A Decent Man of Political Conscience

Orwell (Life & Times Series) (Life&Times series)
Scott Lucas
Manufacturer: Haus Publishers Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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George Orwell (1903-1950) is Britain’s most famous political writer. He aspired to be a novelist, but it was with his reportage on the conditions of the poor and on the Spanish Civil War, and his journalism on popular culture and politics, that he became a leading observer of his times. With his last books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he became a global icon, leaving ideas and terms that continue to shape political and cultural debate. In this controversial new biography, Scott Lucas argues that we now need to be rescued from Orwell. Orwell was never really a socialist, Lucas argues, and, in spite of his interest in "clear writing", he remained as confused in his politics as he was talented and prolific in prose. Most strikingly, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell passed a list of ‘suspect’ individuals, from Charlie Chaplin to Michael Redgrave, to British Intelligence. Since his death, Lucas suggests, Orwell has become a talisman for the neoliberal right, for "little England", and even for an American-led world.

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A Decent Man of Political Conscience.......2006-05-07

In my youth, after reading Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, I considered George Orwell to be that quintessential beacon of political conscience, that single moral compass, a man with a terrifying awareness of the evils of political subterfuge, a man who left us with an essential warning: be vigilant!

A contribution to the Life & Times series, Orwell, by Professor Scott Lucas, is not so much another project of sentimental praise or hagiography of a writer, but a successful attempt at objectivity, revealing a novelist, essayist and critic of popular culture who, at the end of his life, collaborated with "Big Brother" (British Intelligence) naming names of communists that he believed posed a threat to British (western) democracy. This list of 36 men and women remains a secret, and the British authorities continue to hold on to the list in the name of national security. This is a major contradiction of the man, considering he was the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Lucas does not involve himself in petty character assassination, demolishing this twentieth century icon for some sort of personal, political or academic gain. In fact, Professor Lucas reinforces Orwell's "decency", a man of courageous sensibilities; however, his "Englishness" as the author points out, remained a staple throughout his writing career.

For the most part, this short critical biography touches upon Orwell's major writings, analysing each in a fair and interesting manner. Most twentieth century critics believe Orwell to be an essayist, a political critic, more so than a novelist. I believe Lucas agrees with this assessment, though, when one re-reads, `Down and Out in Paris and London', `Homage to Catalonia', `Animal Farm' or `Nineteen Eighty-Four', would have to admit that his talent as a novelist, although not genius, is excellent.

This is a highly polished work, extremely well written and insightful in terms of the author's goal of objectivity. As an admitted hero-worshiper, it was a learning experience to read a piece on Orwell that attempted to approach the subject from many perspectives, some good, some not so, without bias in any form.

That said, my only criticism is that the book should be longer, unpacking a few arguments that required further elaboration, however, it is obvious that the author was under space constraints from his editors. Then again, without question, this is a minor quibble.

Although there seems to be many works on George Orwell, and many excellent biographies, (`Orwell: A Wintry Conscious of a Generation' is noteworthy) this one is surprisingly good: entertaining and educational.

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George Orwell
Raymond Williams
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Product Description

George Orwell has become a hero to diverse and often opposing elements in Anglo-American life. What is the nature of his paradoxical legacy? In this pointed and revealing essay, Raymond Williams offers an eloquent and persuasive account of the "conscious double vision" that makes Orwell's life and work inseparable.

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An English Celebration of George Orwell

George Orwell (Life and Works)
Nigel Flynn
Manufacturer: Rourke Pub Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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ASIN: 086593018X

Customer Reviews:

An English Celebration of George Orwell.......2006-01-13

Nigel Flynn is an experienced editor and writer who studied at the University of Lancaster. His 112-paged "Life and Works" of "George Orwell" is a valuable introduction to the major texts written by George Orwell and aims to encourage a critical understanding of these in relation to events in Orwell's life and literary career, as well as the socio-political climate of his times. Photographs on nearly every page help to tell the history.

George Orwell is one of the most popular writers and interesting free thinkers to have written prose in the English language. He is best known for his titles "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four", books that introduced phrases into the English language such as "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" and "Big Brother is watching you".

The name "George Orwell" is a pen name that was used by Eric Blair, an Anglo-Bengali born of English expatriates. He left Bengal at an early age, was schooled in England, then joined the British Imperial Police and served in Burma from 1922 -27. Orwell (Blair) wrote about it in "The Road to Wigan Pier"(1937) - "I was in the police, which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism . . . in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters, and there is an appreciable difference between doing dirty work and merely profiting by it".

The eventual scourge of socialists and Tories alike, Orwell (Blair) returned to Europe to temporarily tramp about Paris and London, then volunteered to fight for insurgents in the Spanish Civil War, before settling down to a writing career and allowing his war wounds to heal. Nigel Flynn shows how Orwell's (Blair's) essays and books were related to his life experiences and events in which he lived.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" reveals Orwell's work in propaganda and disinformation during WWII in the employ of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). We follow Orwell's development as a man and a writer until we realize that "Nineteen Eighty-Four" has already happened! It began in 1941 with a December bang at Pearl Harbor: for the second time in less than twenty-five years, the U.S. partnered with their two-time nemesis (1776, 1812) and American-powered British Empire emerged victorious from an international brawl between competing brands of fascism. Meanwhile economic fascists usurped the rhetoric of capitalism to hide their anti-capitalist corporatism (see Nicholas John Cull's "Selling War"). Anglos and Yanks have been living an Orwellian nightmare ever since - the latest version of double-speak is the 'War on Terror', which in reality is a 'War on Freedom' camouflaged by information warfare (IW).

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George Orwell (Literature and Life)
Roberta Kalechofsky
Manufacturer: Frederick Ungar
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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GEORGE ORWELL A LIFE
Bernard Crick
Manufacturer: Little Brown & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000QV601G

George Orwell: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

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George Orwell: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
Peter Davison
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0312128207

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