A new collection that celebrates Orwell's status as England's greatest social chronicler

No writer understood the English quite like George Orwell. In unravelling the hypocrisies and contradictions of a nation, he found himself in harried pursuit of an elephant across colonial-era Myanmar, crawling hundreds of feet below ground in a sweltering mine, locked inside the brutal confines of a twentieth-century workhouse, and sifting through the grusome pages of tabloid murder reportage. Amidst the brutality and peculiarity of all that he encountered, Orwell's sharp gaze and magnificent prose style never faltered.

This collection pairs Orwell's masterpiece on English socialism, 'The Lion and the Unicorn', with four shorter sketches from across the country and the British Empire. Tenacious and startlingly erudite, they are the essential writings from England's greatest social chronicler.

George Orwell (1903-1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was a novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. He served as an Imperial Police Officer in Myanmar (formerly Burma), lived in near-destitution in Paris and fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War. His powerful explorations, in both novels and essays, of totalitarianism and fascism firmly established the adjective 'Orwellian' in the English language.