“In the 53 years since his death George Orwell has become a secular saint, acclaimed by the political left and right and many in between, revered as a seer and truth-teller, honored for his moral courage, his razor-sharp intellect and his diamond-hard prose. Somewhere along the way, however, amid all of the hero worship, the real man – the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism – seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well. Orwell has suffered the famous author’s ultimate fate: He is revered and invoked more than he is read.”