You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few p...

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I dreamt—’ he began, and stopped shor...

As I stand at the lichened gate With warring worlds on either hand… To left the black and budless tree… The empty sties, the barns that st… Like tumbling skeletons– and to ri…

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the populat...

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor....

One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners—for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Ye...

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. Hi...

‘We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.’ As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed...

THE rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the p...

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,

Brush your teeth up and down, brot… Oh, brush them up and down! All the folks in London Town Brush their teeth right up and dow… Oh! How they shine!

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...

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...