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'D. J. Taylor has written not only the best recent biography of George Orwell . . . but also one of the cleverest studies of the relationship of that life to the written word.' Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post

'A persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell's work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life . . . [it] is likely to prove in many ways definitive.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in Western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), have together sold over one hundred million copies. Even now, he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international power politics.

D. J. Taylor's new biography, the first full-length study for twenty years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material - newly discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues, recollections from the dwindling band of people who remember him, new information about his life in the early 1930s - to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologising man.

'He presents, I think, the "living" Orwell as well as anyone will ever be able to' John Sutherland