Orwell. The Life: D. Taylor

Shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award 2003

`Definitive` Daily Telegraph

Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective `Orwellian` is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma.

Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, D J Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Moving and revealing, Taylor`s Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.