Inside George Orwell: A Biography - Hardcover

Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101, Doublethink. Few writers can boast the brilliant legacy of George Orwell, both in his numerous additions to the English language and in his profound influence on world literature. This book attempts to bring to life the man behind the words. It explores the influence of his childhood and Eton education, his experience as a policeman in Burma, his deliberate plunge into poverty and his experiences in the Spanish Civil War in the creation of the consciousness of the man who produced Animal Farm and 1984. The book includes new material on Orwell's complex and sometimes reckless sex life, new evidence of his being hunted and spied on in Spain, his paranoia about possible assassination, the strange circumstances of his first marriage and his deathbed wedding to a woman fifteen years his junior. This new material enables this biographer to cast new light on Orwell, the inner man, as well as on Orwell, the great author.

"[In this book] Orwell comes alive in all his shortcomings as well as strengths--an unfaithful husband with an ambiguous attitude toward Jews and homosexuals, yet also as a loyal friend, a courageous militiaman, a generous supporter of struggling writers, a master of plain prose, a champion of freedom of speech, and an outspoken scourge of both capitalist profiteers and Stalinist ideologues. If you assumed, as I did, that nothing fresh and original could be said about a figure so exhaustively studied as George Orwell, you too have much to learn from this superb biography."--John Rodden, author of George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell

"Gordon Bowker has brought the same sure psychological understanding that distinguished his biographies of Malcolm Lowry and Lawrence Durrell to Inside George Orwell. At every point his careful judgment and indefatigable research deepens and enriches our understanding of one of the most complex and most misunderstood of modern writers. It is a splendid and splendidly revealing book, emphasizing the enduring and heroic character of Orwell's achievement 'warts and all.'"--James K. Hopkins, author of Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War

"This superb and fascinating biography adds enormously to our understanding of a man who knew the times he lived in far better than he knew himself."--Lloyd Evans, Evening Standard

"It is an exhilaratingly crowded book. Bowker doesn't really try to add Orwell up; instead, he piles everything in. . . ."--Fred Inglis, Independent Review