Orwell
  • Published: 2 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099283461
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $32.99

Orwell

The Life

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Feb 2011
Paperback
2 Aug 2004
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD BIOGRAPHY AWARD

'Definitive' Daily Telegraph

Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma.

Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, D J Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.
  • Published: 2 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099283461
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

D J Taylor

D.J. Taylor's novels include English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass and Derby Day, both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and Kept: A Victorian Mystery. His other books include After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945, Thackeray, Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Prize, and Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940. He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.

Also by D J Taylor

The Prose Factory
The Windsor Faction
Thackeray
Derby Day
Ask Alice
Bright Young People
Kept
See all

Praise for Orwell

Taylor wins the biographical contest...[He] is an accomplished literary critic and he illuminates Orwell's work in the context of his life elegantly and expertly

Guardian

Taylor's book has the unmistakable depth of flavour that comes from long, slow, careful cooking-pithy and fascinating

Jan Dalley, Financial Times

Taylor writes with such skill and aplomb that it's impossible not to be swept along by the intelligence and observations

Independent on Sunday

Taylor's biography is a persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell's work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life-[it] is likely to prove in many ways definitive

Daily Telegraph

Fetchingly original...Taylor's [biography] is pacy socio-journalism

Ian Thomson, Scotland on Sunday