How Orwell’s stab at socialist propaganda ended up as an attack on ‘the stupid cult of Russia’
George Orwell undertook the field work for The Road to Wigan Pier in the winter of 1936, just after the death of King George V, and wrote…
Margaret Atwood: Why we need science fiction
They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are therefore not about Real Life, which ought to lack coincidences…
Why Brave New World is a terrifying guidebook to our future
The underlying assumption of the book is that humans are biochemical algorithms, that science can hack the human algorithm, and that technology can then be used to…
The best new biographies to buy for Christmas 2021
Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate, £16.99) was one of many biographies to cut down a big subject by yoking it to another. Hoare…