Shooting an Elephant is Orwell’s searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd ‘solely to avoid looking a fool’. The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as ‘My Country Right or Left’, ‘How the Poor Die’ and ‘Such, Such were the Joys’, his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys’ weeklies and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative and hugely entertaining, all show Orwell’s unique ability to get to the heart of any subject.
‘A writer who is still vividly contemporary … Orwell told the truth’
Christopher Hitchens ‘Anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century will still have to read Orwell’
Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books
‘A writer who is still vividly contemporary … Orwell told the truth’
Christopher Hitchens ‘Anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century will still have to read Orwell’
Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books