WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life. By Anna Funder. Knopf. 464 pages. $32. Throughout my reading life, I have returned to George Orwell’s work for the pleasure and power of his words and ...

Eileen married Orwell in 1936, and nine years later, at 39, she became ill with cancer. Demoralized by illness and by Orwell’s infidelities, nastiness and neglect (according to Funder), she ...

What George Orwell’s 1984 can teach us about 2024. This moment demands more than headlines. ... This is an intellectual biography but it is not, to its credit, a hagiography.

Let’s start with Taylor. He traces the usual biographical arc, from Orwell’s birth in Bengal in 1903 to his death from tuberculosis in 1950, via boarding-school sufferings, a spell in the ...