A political satire in which the animals take over running the farm but find their utopian state turning into a dictatorship.

Shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain in 1936, George Orwell planted roses. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. Solnit presents a neglected side of Orwell, who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. She explores the roses in various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his...

Examines the life of George Orwell, the English author of "Animal Farm" and "1984," and discusses the political and social criticism disclosed in his work.

"Ray Welter, who was until recently a high-flying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps to the isolated Scottish Isle of Jura in order to spend a few months in the cottage where George Orwell wrote most of his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray is miserable, and quite prepared to make his troubles go away with the help of copious quantities of excellent scotch. But a few of the local islanders take...

"At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing...