Review by Charlie Black of "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

Orwell delivers a gripping and insightful read in this human, politically sharp and dare I say hopeful account of his time serving the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell joins a militia soon after arriving in revolutionary Barcelona. What he thinks is a trivial choice soon has ramifications as the ideologies of each faction begin to cause friction, whether for power or moral integrity.

Orwell conveys this web of ideologies well. He names the militias but gives little explanation to their allegiances at first, evoking his own confusion, since he did not even know the philosophy of his own militia until long after he joined. Further confusion is created as he travels back and forth to the many places he is posted. Orwell seems to have the lay of the land but as somebody unfamiliar with Spain’s geography I was often left disorientated. Orwell never loses sight of the human tragedy at the heart of war. In his essay "Looking back on the Spanish war," which served as an epilogue in my copy, he ends with a verse in dedication to a soldier he met in Barcelona.

Regardless of this, Orwell still offers superb analysis of the clashes between these ideologically driven militias. It is clear where his sympathies lie but he provides fair criticism to all. Orwell is, as usual, superbly articulate, often humorous, and astonishingly relevant. It is the sections of socio-political analysis, using the context of Spain to make broader statements about fascism, socialism, and class, that kept me reading. Orwell reminds us that fascism is unsustainable; it is the working class it needs but the working class it will always betray.

What caught me by surprise was how being in the mind of someone living through the lead up to the Second World War connected with me. We live in a turbulent time, and to hear from someone living through a similarly uncertain period was oddly comforting. We are not alone in our disdain for the world. It reminds us that although many then were in the "deep, deep sleep of England," as many are now, there were those like Orwell who saw what was happening inside and outside of the country and stood against it.

I would recommend anybody who is feeling anxious about the state of the world to read Homage to Catalonia, if only for the reassurance that failure does not mean the end.

About the reviewer
Charlie Black is a mature student working towards a BA in English with Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. He really enjoys fantasy and science fiction but will read just about anything.

This review won second prize in our 2026 Book Review Competition, held in conjunction with the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Orwell’s Roses" by Rebecca Solnit

In the spring of 1936, a young author set about planting a garden in his rented cottage. Awaiting the arrival of his new wife and hoping to put behind him the experiences as a serving police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell turned to nature to heal both his lungs and calm his mind. His first attempts at recuperation saw him live in extreme poverty, which he later recorded in detail in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. These were places that were a source for great fiction, but it was in the little hamlet of Wallington where he decided to settle his mind.

Solnit begins with Orwell's essay from 1946, "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray," that focused on the beauty of a mature yew tree which long outlived the vicar that planted it. After a lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree. From this spark of a thought, Solnit decided to track down Orwell’s cottage garden and see if his plants had also outlived the creator. He had mentioned revisiting his garden in that essay of 1946 and noted that that too had thrived in his absence. The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble.

Orwell was passionate about nature and the earth; he was a keen gardener and a naturalist. He took many long walks with friends who later commented on his knowledge and alluded to his fear for the future, drawing attention, with anxiety, to this shrub budding early for the time of the year. Solnit urges us to revisit and look deeper into Orwell's prose, to seek out the passages of flora and fauna and promises us that if we do, the grey portrait will turn to colour. Even in his novel 1984, deeply political and prophetic, there are moments of joy. Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it. He was ahead of his time in this interpretation of our living world. 

Extolling simple manual labour with direct visible results must have appealed to Orwell, a passion that led him to further expand his small holding with animals, an orchard and a vegetable garden. Finding predictability with effort that gardening promises was a complete contrast to the uncertain life of prose. He referred to gardening in his many essays, extolling the virtues of the simple, cheap Woolworth rose, the common toad and country life. He advocates for a simple life, in tune with our surroundings. Solnit sums this up with her phrase: "Even when the agenda was bread, what spills over is roses."

This book takes us on a journey through culture and art to society and socialism to examine how roses have represented our desires, passions and goals through the centuries. Throughout these meanderings, Solnit discusses the written words of the essayist, his humour and humanity, his politics and passions to understand him better.

Orwell finally died of tuberculosis aged just 46 after suffering with bronchitis most of his adult life. His final request was for roses to be planted on his grave: "Outside my work, the thing I care for most is gardening – for like the rest of us, it’s beauty for today, hope for tomorrow."

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council.  She writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime.

 

A Book That Changed Me, by Brian Wharton: "1984" by George Orwell

 

The book that changed my life is 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell first published in 1949. I guess a lot of people would choose this because of its far-reaching effects. I first came across the novel as an eighteen-year-old studying for an O-Level in English Literature at night school after my poor CSE grades. The book taught me about world political systems from the far right to the far left and the blurring that often exists in between. After reading it I began think about Communism and Marxism by looking at the governing bodies in Russia and China. I think of myself as a Socialist rather than a capitalist and the book offered up a critique of both.

I am fascinated by the lovers in the novel, Winston Smith and Julia, who publicly follow the ‘party’ line but break the rules until one is forced to betray the other. Mr Charrington the bookseller intrigues me, the way he entraps potential party dissenters into buying prohibited materials. The lines ‘I sold you and you sold me’ stand out clearly and bring to mind that in societies like this you can’t afford to trust anyone. I studied the novel closely at the time, even reading the appendix first which detailed the origins of the party, and its terminology, such as ‘double speak,’ which dictated that citizens should take heed of what language they use, as well as being aware of the ‘thought police’ who seek to suppress the idea of free thinking. Orwell believed that the middle classes often bring about changes in society but in 1984 he says, ‘if there is hope, it’s in the proles.’ 

I haven’t picked up the novel since the 1980s, but I am constantly aware of its politics especially with the increase of worldwide technology, the uses of surveillance equipment and the breakdown in civil liberties.

About the reviewer
Brian Wharton is a former actor, who writes drama and short stories. He also writes film and theatre criticism.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Summer Nineteen Forty-Five" by John Lucas

In his famous essay The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), George Orwell declares that, for those fighting in the Second World War, ‘a better life is ahead for them … and their children.’ Ironically, the darkest days of the war simultaneously encode a moment of utopian, visionary promise: Orwell believes that a very ‘English revolution’ might emerge from the wreckage of the war. This strain of optimism, idealism and utopianism can be traced throughout the war – in works such as Powell and Pressburger's film A Matter of Life and Death, for example – and immediately afterwards, in the popular jubilation of V.E. Day, and the subsequent election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government. It is also one of the subjects of John Lucas’s beautiful and poignant third novel, Summer Nineteen Forty-Five. 

In this novel, set in the aftermath of V.E. Day, the main character’s mother puts a ‘VOTE LABOUR’ poster in the window, and constantly looks to ‘“the promise of the future,”’ when ‘“everything will be better.”’ She is one of many people ‘“who genuinely hoped the world would be different after ’45,”’ as her son, Peter Howard, puts it. The novel celebrates this hopefulness – arising from the joy of victory in both war and subsequent General Election – whilst also charting the disappointment, disillusionment, which accompanied it: ‘“They built their hopes too high,”’ says the son, many years later. 

Somehow, everything seems to change, or seems about to change for the better in 1945, and yet, paradoxically, nothing changes; as Orwell suggests, ‘England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.’ This paradox is what the locals in Lucas’s novel flippantly call the ‘“same difference”’: everything is different, everything stays the same. Likewise, the main character, Peter Howard, ‘must have thought that in the days and weeks following the announcement of Victory in Europe the village of Stonely would continue to breathe the atmosphere that lit up each new day of peace … Now: open the window, inhale the new air. Stretch out a hand to feel the breeze on your bare skin, shiver excitedly at its promise. But no. It didn’t take long to fade, this excitement, it dwindled, dulled, sank back into ordinariness … As the summer went on so, he recalls, in the faces of people he passed in the street … the shadow of disappointment, of let-down … The anticipation [was] so great, the realisation so small.’

One of the problems, as the novel makes clear, is that the anticipation of change for the better – the belief in a new beginning – is always haunted by the past, in this case the horrors and losses of wartime. And not only the past: in the small village of Stonely, the horrors of wartime seem to carry on, after V.E. Day, in the unexplained death of a young evacuee, Lorna May, and the suicide of a local boy. Peacetime is still haunted by violence, evil and loss: ‘When, many years later, Peter thinks back to the summer of 1945, it occurs to him that … the unappeased spirit of the girl was haunting the woods … Something bad had happened … You could say that some malevolent power had been set loose. But you could as well say that this was not confined to a small, rural area of the English Midlands, any more than it was a unique phenomenon of the time when wickedness – Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Hiroshima – provided all the evidence anyone could require of the insufficiency, the fraility, of light, warmth, kindness, against the world of night.’

This tension between light, warmth, kindness and, indeed, hope, as opposed to ‘the world of night’ is everywhere in the novel. Lorna May’s death, its subsequent sensational treatment by the local press, the behaviour of the villagers, and the suicide of one of the suspects, all of these images come to symbolise what Peter Howard calls ‘“a wider betrayal”’ of post-war optimism. In this way, Lucas’s novel stands as a powerful microcosm of wider, historical, political and social trends. It also stands as a very contemporary warning, at a time when the promise of Orwell’s England, Howard’s mother’s optimism, of war-time idealism, post-war Socialism, of the NHS, the Welfare State, seems most under threat. 
   

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, lecturer, editor and critic. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "broken stories" by Reuben Woolley

As its title suggests, Reuben Woolley’s fascinating and highly original new poetry collection is full of broken stories, language and imagery, which come down to us as ‘mirrored repetitions’ and ‘dusty echo[es].’ Stories, language, imagery have been worn out through repetition, their force lost over time – ‘an empty language lingering’ in the present. In this respect, Woolley might agree with George Orwell, who famously wrote in 1946 that the ‘English language is in a bad way,’ partly because of ‘a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ 

Woolley arguably pushes Orwell's ideas even further, to the extent that parts of broken stories seem to imply that metaphors have always been worn out – that the English language has always been in ‘a bad way,’ a ‘dusty echo’ of something ‘always already’ in the past. For Woolley, ‘words come late,’ after the event, ‘& gods were only ever / mirrored repetitions / an empty language lingering / of maidens & failed heroes.’

The problem for a poet, of course, is that ‘words / … is all there is’ – there is no alternative to ‘mongrel words.’ So a poet, while ‘losing the plot,’ must simultaneously still ‘try … to capture it / briefly. fix it / in some assemblage.’ In broken stories, Woolley shows how such an ‘assemblage’ might renew a degenerate language; he disavows ‘mirrored repetitions,’ and ‘empty language,’ rising to Orwell’s challenge to writers to ‘regenerate’ the English language: ‘I don’t want / your infinities     self- / reflected     & old smears,’ he writes. 

Rather, in place of worn-out forms of sublimity ('infinities') or a modern (‘self-reflected’) solipsism, Woolley seeks to recapture the immediacy and political power of words: in this collection, ‘words come / hurting,’ and must at least attempt to reflect the physicality and pain of life – that ‘we still bleed red & die.’ Despite everything, poetry and language in general might still promise something akin to presence – might still connect with ‘all the agony of life.’


About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is director of the M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.