Matt Johnson

Politics Apart from the Declaration and Constitution, there is perhaps no more essentially American document than Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet ‘Common Sense.’ Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash Americans are presently engaged in a bitter fight over their national identity. Liberals argue that America is an idea, a national project to more fully realise the universal rights instantiated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

In the introduction to his 1991 book Orwell: The Authorised Biography, Michael Shelden distinguishes his approach from that of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life, published a decade earlier. While Crick’s volume offered the most complete portrait of Orwell available at that point, Shelden argues that it’s too dull and impersonal—a flood of facts that bury Orwell’s singular, idiosyncratic personality.