A happy vicar I might have been Two hundred years ago To preach upon eternal doom And watch my walnuts grow; But born, alas, in an evil time,

Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, already fairly well known under the guise of ‘children’s books’ (which the...

Summer—like for an instant the aut… And the light through the turning… It slants down the path and ragged… Fiery again, last flames of the dy… A blue—tit darts with a flash of w…

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on vel...

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of ...

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two s...

A dressed man and a naked man Stood by the kip—house fire, Watching the sooty cooking—pots That bubble on the wire; And bidding tanners up and down,

He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronge...

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering whit...

When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty– thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then...