An intellectual who hated intellectuals, a socialist who didn’t trust the state-our foremost political essayist and author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a man of stark, puzzling contradictions. Knowing Orwell’s life and reading Orwell’s works produces just as many questions as it answers.

Celebrated Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor guides fans and new readers alike through the many twists and turns of Orwell’s books, life and thought. As a writer he intended his works to be transparent and instantly accessible, yet they are also full of secrets and surprises, tantalising private histories, and psychological quirks. From his conflicted relationship with religion to his competing anti-imperialism and fascination with empire, this book delves into the complex development of this essential yet enigmatic voice.

Taylor leads us through Orwell’s principal writings and complex life-crafting an illuminating guide to one of the most enduringly relevant writers in the English language.

D.J. Taylor’s new biography, the first full-length study for 20 years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material – newly-discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues, the recollections of the dwindling band of people who remember him, new information about his life in the early 1930s – to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologising man.