Author(s): Christopher Hitchens

Culture & Ideas

'Thomas Carlyle wrote of his Cromwell that he had had to drag him out from under a mound of dead dogs and offal before being able to set him up as a figure worthy of biography. This is not a biography, but I sometimes feel as if George Orwell requires extricating from under a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies . . .' There can be few writers in the world today with a better claim to have inherited Orwell's role than Christopher Hitchens with his unique ability to spot bullshit and enrage those in power. Orwell's Victory is a spectacularly written, aggressive, brilliant defence of one of the handful of modern writers whose view of the world has become if anything even more essential in the half century since his death.