Here are collected all Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes 'Decline of the English Murder', 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging'. The essays that make up this collection testify to the greatness and genius of Orwell also as political writer. Whatever the subject is, the attitude adopted is always one of direct testimony and personal disinterestedness: it is an elementary yet subversive formula, the same one at the origin of the non-alignment that long made Orwell, a refractory individualist, an anarchic pauperist, so unemphatic, a writer who seemed suspicious to the right and to the left at the same time.
