From: joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   "ROBBIE"  writes:   
      
   > 'To this day Orwell's unpopularity on the sectarian Left is   
   > notorious and perplexing, but maybe there is a clue here. He was not   
   > the crypto-reactionary he is painted by some, but he writes very   
   > significantly about Anatole France, who was 'not a socialist but a   
   > radical', nowadays the rarer of the two, and whose radicalism can be   
   > seen in 'his passion for liberty and intellectual honesty'. Could   
   > Orwell more obviously be writing about himself?   
   >   
   > Spectator, 6 January 2007   
   >   
   > More often right than wrong   
   > Geoffrey Wheatcroft   
   > Orwell in Tribune   
   > edited by Paul Anderson   
      
   So also in his remarks on Dickens:   
      
       When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has   
     the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page....  In   
     the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of   
     Dickens's photographs....  He is laughing, with a touch of anger   
     in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.  It is the face of   
     a man who is always fighting against something, the face of a man   
     who is _generously angry_ -- in other words, of a nineteenth-   
     century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal   
     hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now   
     contending for our souls.                                   (1939)   
   --   
   ---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   ||:  On a banjo should be written:  This machine kills blue  :||   
   ||:  devils.                                                 :||   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)