Julian, Liam. "Orwell's Instructive Errors." POLICY REVIEW (June/July 2009).

• Orwell, George. All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays. Ed. George Packer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
• Orwell, George. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Ed. George Packer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Yes, Orwell is still relevant. The particular manner in which he pierced worthless theory, faced facts and defended decency (with fluctuating success), and largely ignored the tradition of accumulated wisdom has rendered him a timeless teacher — one whose inadvertent lessons, while infrequently acknowledged, are just as valuable as his intended ones. Those lessons are timeless but also timely, educative on the day’s latest headlines. Subject the current political chieftains of either party to Orwell’s lens and the wispiness of their rhetoric is laid plain. Start at the top. Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings — say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Obama’s language is not clear. It is loopy and lofty and often lubricious, and is precisely the type that Orwell’s famous edict “Good prose is like a window pane” sought to banish. Fortunately, two new collections of Orwell’s essays, Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art is Propaganda, edited by George Packer, were released late last year, just in time for Election Day; and on page 270 of the latter volume begins the piece “Politics and the English Language,” as effective an inoculation as exists against Obamaspeak’s hardier strains. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/46506232.html.

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.

McCrum, Robert. "1984: the Masterpiece that Killed Orwell." THE OBSERVER May 10, 2009.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition. Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature. "Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s. The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell.