'This book confirms John Newsinger's status as one of our leading Orwell scholars. Clear, wide-ranging and bracingly polemical, it casts new light on the way that Orwell's response to the events of his time was shaped by his idiosyncratic brand of radical socialism. It's a worthy successor to Newsinger's pathbreaking book on Orwell's Politics' -- Philip Bounds, author of Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell (2009) 'George Orwell - voracious reader, novelist, broadcaster, Republican fighter in the Spanish civil war, essayist, columnist, film and book reviewer, poet, war correspondent and dedicated father - died in 1950 yet remains one of the most influential thinkers in the world today. Here, John Newsinger, in his insightful, lucid, engaging and original examination of the evolution of Orwell's politics, shows precisely why' -- Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism, Lincoln University, and Chair of the Orwell Society

John Newsinger is Professor of Modern History at Bath Spa University. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, Dangerous Men: the SAS and Popular Culture, Orwell's Politics, Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement, The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire, and British Counterinsurgency.