Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature: Coleridge's Poetry up to 1803: A study in the history of ideas Book

Some of these pieces were worth reading, others not. Christopher Hitchens has nothing especially interesting to say. John Rossi's introduction is usefull, if rather basic. Margery Sabin's piece on Orwell's nonfiction of the 1930s didn't teach me anything really, though I was glad to have read it. Orwell and the British left, by Ian Williams, was the best thing in the book. It oriented me to the internal politics, which gets rather confusing, at least for an American, and is pretty essential knowledge if you want to understand Orwell's idosyncratic brand of socialism, why he joined the ILP - he made a critical remarks of the party in Wigan Pier -, what he meant by 'Tory Anarchism', and how he related to the left-wing mileiu (he, Williams, also debunks the whole list controversy, a red herring that is used to write off Orwell and his arguements for Socialism). And so on. A decent introduction but not really worth the effort.