For some reason, religious language sticks to George Orwell. The late historian Angus Calder, reviewing the collected non-fiction in the late 1960s, described Orwell’s decision to join the Imperial Police in Burma as “the first of those individualistic decisions which mark his life like the stations of the cross”. Unimpressed by the biographical “study” by George Woodcock (Orwell attempted to forbid authorised biographies), Tom Nairn invoked “Orwell the individualist, the angry man of conscience who wanted to battle against all ‘smelly little orthodoxies’, [who] ended up as the foremost literary apostle of anti-communism.” In 2012, New Yorker journalist Katherine Boo was described as “George Orwell’s greatest living acolyte”.
“No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid,” Orwell wrote in his final long essay, attempting to disentangle the apotheosis of Mahatma Ghandi. “But sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”
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