Orwell in Tribune

George Orwell's most important and lasting newspaper journalism is to be found in the columns he wrote for the left-wing weekly "Tribune" during the mid-1940s. A reviewer from 1940, he became the paper's literary editor in 1943, and in the next thirteen months wrote 59 weekly pieces under the rubric "As I Please", on an extraordinarily diverse range of topics. He left to work briefly for the "Observer" as a war correspondent, but in autumn 1945 resumed his "Tribune" column, writing weekly opinion pieces in 1945-6 and a further 21 installments of "As I Please" in 1946-7. Orwell's columns - written while he was working on his two greatest novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" - have never before been collected in a single volume. This book shows Orwell at the height of his powers as a writer - as his biographer, Bernard Crick, put it, 'the Doctor Johnson of the left'.