George Orwell

‘It’s rather hackwork,’ Orwell wrote to his friend, the writer Arthur Koestler, in 1946. ‘The chief bore is reading the books.’ The letter is reprinted from George Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison and published this week by Liveright. Plus, why Orwell wrote 1984.

Three years before writing '1984,' George Orwell penned a letter detailing the thesis of his great novel and warning of the rise of totalitarian police states.