And it is a specifically English identity. What would he have made of our contemporary politicians’ attempts to assure us that all is well with the Union, as it suffers the convulsions of its current St Vitus’ Dance? Not much, I suspect. He had a devastatingly accurate instinct for cant.

It is, of course, as a ‘political’ writer that he is now best-known. Sixty years after publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the greatest fictional demolition of totalitarianism, and any decently educated twelve-year-old can explain what Animal Farm is about. But, in truth, there is almost none of his successful work, either fiction or non-fiction, that is not political. It doesn’t matter whether he is writing in his early ‘Tory Anarchist’ state, or as the committed socialist of later years, his work is always about that basic political question – why do we live like this?

What marks it out from other political writing is not merely the quality of the prose, but its moral authority. Where does this come from? Would he, for example, have produced such luminescent work had had he not had his first unsuitable job? If he had not suffered at the hands of oafs at his ghastly prep school? If he had not had the years of failure? I think the answer to all these questions is ‘no’.

But he also had the paradoxical good fortune to live in evil times. There could be no accommodation with fascism – it was either resistance or capitulation, and everything he wrote from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until his death was infused with the same urgent imperative to resist totalitarianism. Of course, some of it is absurdly overstated (can he really have believed that ‘only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years… I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood,’ in 1940?), but evil times force harsh judgements.

Orwell could toss off sentences like that with greater authority than most because of the quality not merely of his writing but of his experience. When he spoke of life at the bottom of the heap he did so as someone who had lived as a scullion and a tramp. When he talked of war and death he did so as someone who had fought in war and seen people die. The experiences had translated a natural hatred of authority into a political manifesto of sorts. In ‘Why I Write’ he claimed that he was driven more by egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm and curiosity than by any political purpose. Yet in the same essay he claims that those of his books which lacked a political purpose are those which are most ornate and pointless. This apparent contradiction can, of course be explained in the narrow sense in which he talks of his political purpose (‘against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism.’) But anyone can profess a commitment to some ideology or other, and given those particular options, what sensible personal would not make that choice?

I think there is another explanation, too. What Orwell’s experiences – both as figure of authority and as scullion – had given him was a lived understanding of the human condition. It was this grounding in reality which bestowed a more profound political instinct than would be available to some sloganeering zealot. He had acquired a capacity to empathise with the foot-soldiers of history, the put-upon people generally taken for granted, ignored or squashed by the great ‘isms’ of one sort or another. It conferred upon him the remarkable ability to achieve what every journalist and essayist seeks.

He could tell the truth.

Jeremy Paxman, 2009

Why I Write

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and under-valued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended – writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war of 1914–18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities.