Instead they – invariably, meaninglessly – suffer ‘misery’. They have not, of course. It is just that that is the word the mental function key brings up when someone is required to write about disruption on the transport system.

Orwell is the enemy of laziness, vagueness and staleness. His 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’ remains the best starting point for anyone hoping to achieve the deceptively hard task of clear communication. He boils the business down to five instructions:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

He might have added – for it was certainly true in his case – that it also helps not to have had your head cluttered, your voice strangulated and your writing hand swathed in bandages by attending one of our finer universities.

You will find nothing much here about fashion, Westminster politics, gossip, relationships, must-have gadgets and holidays, not a mention of the hints dropped by payroll propagandists, nor a word from anonymous ‘sources close to’ some soon-to-be forgotten minister, and nothing at all about television, pop music, or most of the other subjects which enable our increasingly feeble newspapers to trail their ink across page after page.

What you will find, instead, is an abundance of everything from the life of a book reviewer to how it is to watch a man hanged. The impeccable style is one thing. But if I had to sum up what makes Orwell’s essays so remarkable it is that that they always surprise you. Sometimes it is the choice of subject matter: how many journalists can write with any authority on what it is like to queue to be let into an overnight shelter for the homeless? More often, it’s the totally unexpected insight. He can write a sixty-page essay on Charles Dickens which frequently seems to be tending to a conclusion that he was a sentimental old fool, but then come to an unexpectedly affectionate final judgement. You have travelled with him on his journey and are rather startled, and pleased, to discover where you have ended up.

The Dickens essay was an attempt to worry away at why he was such a successful writer and is the longest in this collection. But it is infused with the same spirit of personal engagement as everything else. It is that amazing ability to make you believe that you would have felt as he felt that is his genius. Take ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which recounts an incident during his time as a policeman in Burma. It is a remarkable piece. There is, firstly, the language. When he first sees the elephant, which is said to have run amok, it is standing, beating a bunch of grass against its knees, ‘with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have’. In the seconds after pulling the trigger the beast remains standing, but ‘a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant… every line of his body altered… He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old.’ Then the elephant sags to its knees, its mouth slobbering. And, the utterly perfect sentence: ‘An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him.’

Being Orwell, of course, the event is put to political purpose, demonstrating the futility of the imperial project. He has already told us that ‘every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. Then he reveals in the last sentence that he had killed the elephant ‘solely to avoid looking a fool’. Yes, you think, that makes perfect sense. It is hard to imagine many people less suited to the job of an imperial policeman than Orwell.

Yet, while he hated imperialism, he could still remark that the British empire was ‘a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it’. In another essay (‘My Country Right or Left’) he admits to finding it childish that he feels it faintly sacrilegious not to stand to attention during ‘God Save the King’, but that he would sooner have that instinct ‘than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so “enlightened” that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions’.

There is something very striking about this patriotism of his. It was laid out most obviously in his manifesto for a post-war revolution, The Lion and The Unicorn, but his love of England informs just about everything he wrote. It is there like a defiant bugle call rallying us to appreciate kippers, crumpets, marmalade and stilton cheese in ‘In Defence of English Cooking’. It is there like a comforting cup of tea in ‘Decline of the English Murder’. Both belong to a time when – seen from this distance – English life appears to have been more settled, less commercial, more neighbourly and less racked by uncertainty of purpose. You cannot read a piece like ‘Bookshop Memories’ without immediately conjuring up the bad suits and rank smell of dead cigarettes. They could not have been written about any other country on earth.

Yet this is a million miles away from the nostalgic pastiche that John Major once conjured up for a Conservative conference when he talked about the country being a place of warm beer, cricket grounds and ‘old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist’. It is not just that in Orwell’s day there really were old maids on bicycles and that the Sunday place of pilgrimage had not yet become some ugly out-of-town shopping warehouse. It is that Orwell intuitively understood what it was to be English, and that he felt the possibilities within that identity. John Major, decent man though he may have been, was perpetrating the politician’s attempt to seem an ordinary bloke. Orwell lives and breathes the identity.