Homage to Catalonia

This is my third Orwell book after Animal Farm and 1984. It was good to dip a toe into his essayistic writing, this was certainly as compelling as a novel and you would be forgiven for thinking it was.



It is well narrated and you certainly won't want it to come to an end. The mixture of historical lesson and insight to the human condition is an engaging blend. You can recognise the politics of the author of the above mentioned novels (unwritten at this time) and the integrity and courage of the man shines like a beacon through the book.



Good for anyone either interested in Orwell as a writer outside of fiction or for an insight into a period of history that was massively influential to the freedom we enjoy in Europe today.



highly recommended

What a good read this book was. As a participant of the Spanish civil war, Orwell can give detailed accounts on the front line. This he does with modesty and obvious honesty. I find that George Orwell writes in such an honest fashion, that it is natural to believe him. His style is simple and clear. The pictures he paints of the political sacrifice of the workers who returning from war are depried of wages, dragged from hospital beds, imprisoned are shocking to the right minded. The poorly researched reporting of the UK press highlights how the press gave a false picture to the rest of the world. Perhaps lessons could have been learned to help curb Hitler early on. The press were manipulated and should be ashamed of themselves. Effectively putting the oppressed beyond extneral help. When first published, I can imagine this book made many squirm with shame.

Very finely narrated classic account of the civil war in Spain in the 1930s. Unsentimental and surprising in some respects. Orwell like many others went from a somewhat privileged background in England to fight for the forces of the left arrayed against the fascist forces of Franco. He went somewhat naive but one gets the impression his outlook soon matured and he became increasingly sceptical about the nature of the conflict in which he had become embroiled. It would seem that it was this experience in Spain which first gave him insight into the "imperfections" of far left wing politics and ideology and its totalitarian tendencies, and it must have been at this time that the seeds of Animal Farm and 1984 were sown. The book deserves its status as a classic and the narration is one of the finest I have encountered. Recommended.