New Statesman: Scott Lucas, a University of Birmingham cultural historian, asserts that George Orwell was not a socialist, despite usually being held up as having impeccable “English socialist” credentials. For one thing, he apparently “named names” in the British equivalent of the McCarthy witchhunt; for another, Lucas says, his values were not particularly socialist.

Praise, if you will, Orwell’s fighting spirit, praise his

generous anger, praise his free intelligence. Just

remember that, no matter how smelly the

orthodoxies, 19th-century liberalism and 20th-century

anti-communism did not, and still do not, constitute

socialism.