Animal Farm and 1984

Animal Farm

'[Orwell's] wit is both edged and human. Few writers of any period have been able to use the English language so simply and accurately to say what they mean, and at the same time to mean something' The New Republic (1946)

'Animal Farm remains our great satire on the darker face of modern history' Malcolm Bradbury

'The book for everyone and Everyman, its brightness undimmed after fifty years' Daily Telegraph

'The book it's writer called "a little squib" is the finest prose satire in English after Gulliver's Travels' Julian Symons

'Orwell ... has written in a prose so plain and spare, so admirably proportioned to his purpose, that Animal Farm even seems very creditable if we compare it with Voltaire and Swift' The New Yorker

'A prophet who thought the unthinkable and spoke the unspeakable, even when it offended conventional thought' Daily Express

'Matchlessly sharp and fresh ... The clearest and most compelling English prose style this century' Sunday Times

Nineteen Eighty-Four

'His final masterpiece ... enthralling and indispensable for understanding modern history' New York Review of Books

'A profound, terrifying and wholly fascinating book ... Orwell's theory of power is developed brilliantly' The New Yorker

'Brilliantly constructed and told' Guardian

'There is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell's utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years' time' TIME