In the Library
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell, 1938
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 80k words
£1.99
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This edition is still in copyright in the United States, so it cannot be bought there.
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Still in copyright in the United States: this edition is sold and read outside it.
the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
In a Barcelona barracks, an Italian militiaman grips George Orwell's hand so hard that Orwell decides, on the spot, never to see him again, so the moment stays whole. That single, deliberate loss opens the strangest memoir to come out of the Spanish Civil War: Orwell arrived to fight fascism and found, for one unrepeatable season, a city where tipping was illegal and strangers called each other comrade and meant it. Then a sniper's bullet passes clean through his throat, missing the artery by about a millimetre, and he comes back from the front to find his own side hunting his friends as traitors and newspapers at home reporting battles that were never fought. He ends the book back in an England still fast asleep, at peace, oblivious to what is coming, sure the world will not wake until the bombs do it for us. Few writers have paid this much, in blood and in disillusion, to tell the truth this plainly.