George Orwell may be best known today as the author of 1984 and Animal Farm but first and foremost he was an essayist not a novelist. Currently we have two titles in stock that celebrate this side of his work.

Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

We also have in stock Orwell: The Observer Years. George Orwell's books defined his times, and his journalism for The Observer defined the spirit of the newspaper. It was not until late 1941, though, that Orwell was asked to write for The Observer. At the time, the paper was edited by JL Garvin, a staunch Churchillian Tory, but it was owned by the Astor family. And it was Lord Astor's son, David Astor who first approached Orwell, following a recommendation by Cyril Connolly. Astor knew Orwell only by his patriotic call to arms, The Lion and The Unicorn, but already admired his clarity of thought.

For two old Etonians, their social backgrounds could hardly have been more contrasting. Orwell (né Eric Blair) was born in Bengal, the son of an official in the Indian Civil Service. He joined the imperial police force in Burma before taking up writing and tramping and writing about tramping. Astor was a scion of a multi-millionaire Anglo-American family. His mother, Nancy, was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons. Their country seat, Cliveden, was the scene of the kind of Edwardian lavishness that, were it not for Merchant and Ivory, would tax the modern imagination. Orwell wanted an end to the class system and economic inequality. Astor was a patrician liberal. Yet the two hit it off immediately.

Astor often slept at Orwell's Belsize Park flat during the blackout and, like a pair of overgrown students (Orwell never went to university and Astor dropped out of Oxford), the two would stay up discussing politics and the war. The conversations had a lasting influence on Astor. As Richard Cockett notes in his David Astor and The Observer, Orwell was 'the man who more than any other... helped to shape the new Observer'.

The Observer of 25 March 1945 ran an Orwell piece filed from Germany entitled 'Creating Order Out Of Cologne Slum'. Two weeks later he followed it up with an article about the 'Future Of A Ruined Germany'. In between his wife, Eileen, died in hospital in London during a routine operation to remove a growth in her womb.

The previous summer they had adopted a baby boy, Richard. It was the child's dreadful destiny to lose two sets of parents before he was seven. (In the event, he was brought up by Orwell's sister Avril, and became a farmer, as Orwell had once hoped he would in a letter to a friend.) Eileen wrote to her husband before the operation detailing her joy at Richard and her despair at living in London. She looked forward to a life beyond the decrepit confines of the capital. By all accounts, Orwell was not the most attentive of husbands, and was prone to affairs, but it seems that he had grown closer to his wife after Richard's adoption.

The crushing sense of loss he must have experienced was reflected in the devastated landscape he encountered on his return to continental Europe following Eileen's funeral. 'To walk through the ruined cities of Germany,' he wrote in The Observer on 8 April, 'is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.'

In all he filed 19 dispatches from the Continent. Most were written from Paris, but he also travelled to Nuremberg, Stuttgart - where he eloquently described the looting that followed its collapse - and Austria.

Taken together, these pieces read not as straightforward reporting, nor even reportage, but more like a sober summary of events that were too large, and too chaotic, to summarise. He had wanted to witness the remnants of a totalitarian regime and found, instead, a defeated people much like any other. Astor did not think reporting was Orwell's strongest suit. In the circumstances the singular achievement was not what he wrote but that he wrote.