George Orwell enjoyed making life hard for himself. He often lived in conditions so spartan that even a monk might have preferred the nearest motel. One imagines that if a bed of nails was available, Orwell would choose to sleep on it. Despite a chronic lung condition, he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, spending five long winter months in the trenches, an experience that came near to killing him. (He was wounded by a bullet through the neck; if he’d been a couple of inches shorter it would have been through his head.) In failing health, you or I might prefer to be close to medical help. Not Orwell, who chose to spend his final days living in an isolated cottage on a Scottish island so remote that in letters to visitors it took several paragraphs to explain how to get there. It is this indifference to ordinary bourgeois comforts that makes Orwell at the same time admirable and exasperating, at least as he emerges from the pages of D.J. Taylor’s biography, Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus Books). The one thing that is indisputable was his determination to write. Once he had decided in his mid-twenties to become a writer he let nothing stand in his way. Publishers’ indifference, critical neglect, political opposition, even the ever-present ill health, nothing kept him from his typewriter. The last days of his life he spent revising what became 1984, mostly in bed, smoking like a chimney and coughing his lungs out. Orwell once wrote that “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” It is perhaps the tragedy of his own life that when the victories finally came—his last two novels 1984 and Animal Farm were huge successes—it was too late; he was already in an early grave.

—Daniel Francis

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