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. ]]> Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:02:54 +0000 http://www.ogmabooks.com/blog/london-library/ It is nice to see that our favourite library the London Library in St James's Square has just completed the latest stage of its refurbishment. The library has always been something of a labyrinthine but under the auspices of London firm Haworth Tompkins the new additions, particluarly the art room have been done with a real sensitivity and undertanding of the library's history and atmosphere.

The project's attention to detail descends even to the toilets. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed has made a strange and unsettling decorative scheme for the toilets in the basement.

The London Library, the largest independent lending library in the world, was founded by the great writer Thomas Carlyle, who opposed the policies of the British Library (among other things, he didn't like the ne'er-do-wells allowed to loaf around reading newspapers) and thought the catalogues were useless (the London Library eventually invented a new cataloguing system to address this).

Carlyle lived at Cheyne Row in Chelsea and wanted a library closer to his house than Bloomsbury's British Museum and his own place to store books. While he believed that reading should be done at home, he was himself troubled by “piano-playing neighbours on one side, crowing cockerels on the other”, so the London Library was created as a home away from home for readers seeking quiet. It moved to its current site in 1845 from the first floor of the Travellers Club on Pall Mall, and has evolved in stages over the last 165 years. It is well worth a visit.

John Rewald was born Gustav Rewald in Berlin in 1912. In 1932 he want to France to complete his studies.At the Sorbonne he wrote his dissertation on the friendship of Zola and Cézanne. When France declared war on Germany in 1939, he was interned as an enemy alien. He emigrated to the United States in 1941 and Alfred Barr, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, was his sponsor. From 1943 on, he consulted for the Museum of Modern Art, organizing exhibitions for it and other museums and researching his magnum opus, a history of Impressionism. The History of Impressionism was published in 1946 to universal acclaim and remains the standard work on the subject.

As a devoted Cézanne scholar, Rewald was instrumental in creating a foundation to save Cézanne's studio and turn it into a museum. It is now a permanent museum in Aix-en-Provence, L'atelier Cézanne, and can be viewed as it was at the painter's death. The citizens of Aix, in gratitude to Rewald, named a street after him.

Rewald, a highly cultured and erudite man and a renowned writer, was the product of four distinct civilizations: the pre-World War I Wilhelmine German Empire, the Weimar Republic of Germany, the French Third Republic in its final years, and America in the latter half of the 20th Century. He is famous not only for his solid scholarship, and the ground-breaking treatment of his subject, but also for the beauty and lucidity of his prose which, invariably sober and scholarly, never departing from the factual, rises at times to a culminating lyricism.

We feel very fortunate in being able to offer this book.