The first half of this work documents Orwell's sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions amongst the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop,

Insurance salesman George "Fatty" Bowling lives with his humorless wife and their two irritating children in a dull house in a tract development in the historyless London suburb of West Bletchley. The year is 1938. Doomsayers are declaring that England will be at war again by 1941. ...

George Orwell's picture of the British Indian Empire is a world of real and mental violence, pure racism, provocations by and manipulations of indigenous rebellions, corruption,