Bernard Crick
“George Orwell: A Life”

‘NEW EDITION — THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY’
JULIAN SYMONS — IN THE SUNDAY TIMES

Bernard Crick is Emeritus Professor of Birkbeck, the University of London's college for mature part-time students. He took early retire-ment in 1984 to live in Edinburgh and interest himself in 'British Isles' questions. Bom in 1929, he was educated at the London School of Economics and Harvard. He lived for four years in North America before teaching at the L S E and then Sheffield University.

His other books include The American Science of Politics; the widely translated In Defence of Politics (Penguin, 1964; revised edition, 1993); Essays on Politics and Literature; and Political Thoughts and Polemics.

Joint editor of the Political Quarterly from 1965 until 1980, now literary editor, he has written for the Observer, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Scotsman and the Independent, and has reviewed plays for The Times Higher Educational Supplement, the New Review and in the Scottish press. This book was the Yorhhire Post Book of the Year for 1980.

‘A triumph of the first order’
— Michael Foot in the London Evening Standard

More than a decade after it's first publication, Bernard Crick's masterly study of one of Britain's greatest ‘politic writers’ remains the most objective account of Orwell's strange life. Now reissued with a substantial new Afterword, it includes both Crick's trenchant criticism of other approaches to Orwell and important new material.

‘It is hardly worth using up the space to declare just how good it is. Different readers will come away from seventeen pungent and packed chapters with diverse memories of its excellence’ — Peter Sedgwick in the Guardian.

‘Crick has a remarkable independent mind and a large irascible way of seeing things‘ — Noel Annan in the New York Review of Books.

‘Crick's analytical mind, combined with his mastery of the historical background and context, make him the ideal guide’ — Arthur Koestler in the Observer.

‘Assured and eloquent... In its own uncompromised integrity it is both monumental and appeealing’ — Los Angeles Times.

First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg Ltd 1980.
Published in Penguin Books 1982.
Reprinted with new Preface and new Appendix 1992.
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Copyright © Bernard Crick, 1980, 1982, 1992
All rights reserved
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Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England.

Excerpts from the following works by George Orwell are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: Animal Farm; Burmese Days', A Clergyman's Daughter; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volumes 1-4; Coming Up For Air, Dickens, Dali and Others', Down and Out in Paris and London; Homage to Catalonia, Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Road to Wigan Pier; Shooting an Elephant; Such, Such Were the Joys; copyright 1933, 1934, 1936 by George Orwell; copyright 1945, 1946, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1953 by Sonia Brownell Orwell; copyright 1946, 1949 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © Sonia Pitt-Rivers, 1961, 1962; copyright © Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968, 1977; copyright © Sonia Orwell, 1974.

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Made and printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk.

PENGUIN BOOKS
http://www.penguinclassics.com/
in association with Secker and Warburg
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OCR: Mikhail V. Chernyshev
E-mail: [email protected]

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Cover photograph:
Vernon Richards / George Orwell Archive.

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Bernard Crick“George Orwell: A Life”

Bernard Crick
“George Orwell: A Life”