Gessen, Keith. "Eternal Vigilance." NEW STATESMAN May 28, 2009.

Throughout the 1940s, George Orwell was formulating the ideas about language and politics that found their ultimate expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His essays from this period are a plain-spoken pleasure, despite their contradictions By 1940, George Orwell had behind him four conventional “social” novels and, more significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his classic account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Gradually in the others but culminating in Homage, Orwell perfected his signature “plain” style, which so resembles someone speaking honestly and without pretence directly to you, and he had more or less settled on his political opinions: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” So he said in 1946. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/orwell-essays-64257-spain.