George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife. Anna Funder said that Orwell was a ...

George Orwell, the inventor of the Ministry of Love and Room 101 in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was married for the second time in Room 65 of University College Hospital in London. His sickbed was ...

DJ Taylor published Orwell: The Lifein 2003. Now he offers a new biography that draws upon new materials that have surfaced since (Orwell’s letters to women he was infatuated with, for instance).

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 ...