George Orwell

First published: Fortnightly. — GB, London. — November 1936.

George Orwell on bookselling—its peculiarities and characters—the rarity of really bookish people and how he lost the taste for books. Read it; it's short, and it’s a very good and rather humorous essay, with lines like: “…the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.”

The extent of MI5’s ten-year surveillance of George Orwell, suspected communist, and the “officers' spectacular ability to misjudge what they saw” is revealed in documents that are being made public for the first time.

'This man has advanced communist views ... He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours ... '