George orwell

The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope, Plato, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and millions of others — but not, alas, my former next-door neighbour, the wonderfully controversial Brian Sewell. Crammed in alongside George Orwell’s ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy’ and H. L. Mencken’s ‘Literature always thrives best in an atmosphere of hearty strife,’ the author’s own views often hit hardest.

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew. Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement. The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and

The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre, and Clare Morrall’s astute and vigorously imagined novel follows on from the best of them, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and (most recently)Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship. Intriguingly, the future that Morrall imagines very much resembles the past. Following 50 years of climate catastrophe, and the spread of the population-depleting Hoffman’s disease, the only hope for humanity’s survival is to find ways of ‘living with the weather’, or learning ‘skills that don’t depend on failing technology’. Her heroine, the 22-year-old Roza Polanski, ekes

John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for anyone set on a life of writing about books, was intentionally truncated, ending its chronology before Gross’s own time of eminence. Two decades after the book’s publication in 1969, Gross explained in a new afterword that he had not wanted to comment on his peers and colleagues, for fear of misunderstanding or offence. A perfectly justifiable approach, but it made the book uncomfortably tantalising for those who prefer their gossip to be at the expense of the living. The Prose Factory is dedicated to Gross, and partially overlaps with The

‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’ He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it. ‘He is the unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul,’ he