Let It Fly, Low and High

Tuesday will be seventy-five years since the death of George Orwell. Quite minor a date, but so massive a figure – patron saint of English decency, balletic navigator of twentieth-century tides, nominative source of a new word for ‘bad’ – that we can expect a broad flurry of pieces. All will draw on his Essays, which are as close as this nation comes to required reading, but few will mention his early novel, Keep The Aspidistra Flying.