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A Seer's Blind Spots; On George Orwell's 100th, a Look at a Flawed and Fascinating Writer

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 20030625
Author:Glenn Frankel

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent," George Orwell wrote in 1949. He was referring to the recently assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, but these days the same test might well apply to himself, for in the 53 years since his death Orwell has become a secular saint, acclaimed by the political left and right and many in between, revered as a seer and truth-teller, honored for his moral courage, his razor-sharp intellect and his diamond-hard prose.

"The first saint of our age," as social historian Noel Annan once described him, "quirky, fierce, independent and beholden ...

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