"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." So starts this 1941 essay in which Orwell argues that the outdated British class system was hampering the war effort, and that in order to defeat Hitler, Britain needed a
Few figures in intellectual history have proved as notorious and ambiguous as Niccolo Machiavelli. But while his treatise The Prince made his name synonymous with autocratic ruthlessness and cynical manipulation, The Discourses (c.1517) shows a radically
This outstanding collection brings together Orwell’s longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes My Country Right or Left, Decline of the English Murder, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging.With great originality and wit Orw
No political concept is more used, and misused, than that of democracy. Nearly every regime today claims to be democratic, but not all "democracies" allow free politics, and free politics existed long before democratic franchises. This book is a short acc
In this illuminating celebration of the political world, Bernard Crick asserts that politics, with its compromises and power struggles, remains the only tested alternative to government by coercion, making both freedom and order possible in heterogeneous
