In the Shadow of Big Brother

In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested after the planned invasion, his name wasn’t included. Much of the acclaim then was in recognition of his novel Animal Farm, but in the years since, Orwell’s popularity has increasingly rested on his final work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published the summer before he died. Lynskey’s biography of the book expertly locates Nineteen Eighty-Four in the context of Orwell’s life, evoking the drab deprivations of 1940s Britain.

Source: literaryreview.co.uk