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 Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from the moral enormity of Jonathan Swift’s strange genius and a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, a comic yet profound discussion of naughty sea-side picture postcards and a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose style, Orwell’s essays challenge, move and entertain. Contents: Why I Write The Spike A Hanging Shooting an Elephant Bookshop Memories Marrakech Charles Dickens Boys’ Weeklies Inside the Whale My Country Right or Left The Lion and the Unicorn Wells, Hitler and the World State The Art of Donald McGill Rudyard Kipling Looking Back on the Spanish War W.B. Yeats Poetry and the Microphone Benefit of Clergy; Some Notes on Salvador Dali Raffles and Miss Blandish Arthur Koestler Antisemitism in Britain In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse Notes on Nationalism Good Bad Books The Sporting Spirit Nonsense Poetry The Prevention of Literature Books v. Cigarettes Decline of the English Murder Politics and the English Language Some Thoughts on the Common Toad A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray Confessions of a Book Reviewer Politics vs Literature: An Examination of *Gulliver’s Travels* How the Poor Die Riding Down from Bangor Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool Such, Such Were the Joys Writers and Leviathan Reflections on Gandhi