A new edition with a new introduction, this is a deeply personal record of Orwell's growing despair and disillusionment with the Spanish Civil War, gathering themes he would later explore to perfection in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having joined the international leftist forces in Barcelona, Orwell grew frustrated by the repressive totalitarianism of Stalin's brand of communism.
George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton and became a policeman in Burma. After leaving the police, he began to investigate the poverty in India and Europe which shaped his thinking about equality, money and power. His great works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are a product of his hatred of totalitarianism in all its forms and he was as critical of Stalin in the 1930s as he was ready to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. His legacy of writing and political thought is much admired today. He died of tuberculosis in 1950.
Dr. Jaron Murphy (Introduction) is a Senior Lecturer in Communication, Journalism and Literature at Bournemouth University. An award-winning journalist, he holds a DPhil in Literature from the University of Oxford. In 2018, he appeared on the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) list of most respected journalists following research by Cardiff University which asked journalists working in the UK and Ireland which living journalist they felt most embodies the values of journalism that they respect and adhere to. His scholarship on Orwell includes the chapter Orwell the Journalist for the impending Oxford Handbook of George Orwell (OUP). In 2022, he was Chair of the judging panel for the UK-wide Young Journalist's Award sponsored by the Orwell Society and National Union of Journalists. The panel included Orwell's son, Richard Blair, who is Patron of the Orwell Society.