Reviews for George Orwell

The average rating for George Orwell based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-24 00:00:00 Anna Kuznyetsova A 108 year old text book looking at the social and historical context to Chaucer's life that has been malingering on our shelves for 20 years does not bespeak fun times. After all, with a comedy record featuring Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jane Eyre and any Wuthering Heights, the Victorians can hardly be said to have been laugh-a-minute. Unless you're a Chaucer scholar. This is like an extended Mary Whitehouse Experience History Today sketch. Coulton takes the Victorian piss out of everybody, particularly William Morris the great flowery fool, other historians, foreigners generally, the French and Germans specifically and medieval defrocked clergy. Armed with my new-found knowledge of Chaucer's society, and scathing of the French, I will definitely re-read The Canterbury Tales at some unspecified point in the future.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-22 00:00:00 Ryan Wiechens Osborne exemplified a generation of dramatists who detonated the understated drawing-room dramas of Terrence Rattigan and Noel Coward, which dominated the West End in the years before and after WW II. He exploded onto the London stage in 1957 with Look Back in Anger. Featuring overstatements, long speeches, and strident anti-class-structure themes, the play shocked audiences, critics, and fellow playwrights. Of 12 opening-night critics, only two saw the breakthrough that Look Back in Anger represented (a television broadcast of an excerpt from the play soon brought Osborne to the attention of the younger audience he sought). Two other masterpieces, The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence, followed in the next several years. Heilpern writes with enviable ease and wit, explaining how he came to write Osborne's authorized biography: he met casually with the playwright long before a biography was in the offing and after Osborne's death got to know his wife, who gave him complete access to her husband's papers. Osborne emerges from this vivid, masterful biography as a giant of modern literature.