D J Taylor

D J Taylor is well-known as a novelist, critic and reviewer: his non-fiction books include After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. He lives in Norwich.

Orwell: The Life by DJ Taylor
Chatto & Windus

In the last half-century George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have sold over 30 million copies. The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language, while Orwell himself has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of obscurity, Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint.