Over seventy years since his premature death George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have together sold over 40 million copies. Even now he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international power-politics. D. J. Taylor''s new biography the first full-length study for 20 years draws on a wide range of previously unseen material - newly-discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues the recollections of the dwindling band of people who remember him new information about his life in the early 1930s - to produce a definitive portrait of this complex driven and self-mythologising man. . Language: English