It’s not often that football friendlies signal war – especially between allies. The game in London between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow, part of a tour of Britain by the Soviets in November 1945, was meant to celebrate the recent victory over Nazism. But things went badly wrong. Arsenal cheated by fielding ringers like England’s ‘wizard winger’ Stanley Matthews. The game started violently – and got worse. The thick London fog didn’t help, confusing the players and making it virtually impossible for officials and spectators to see the action. After Dynamo’s 4–3 thrilling victory, both sides accused each other of bringing football into disrepute. George Orwell bemoaned the ‘orgies of hatred’ engendered by such encounters, coining his famous phrase that international sport was ‘war minus the shooting’. This chapter investigates football’s role in helping trigger the Cold War in the mid- to late-1940s. It details Dynamo Moscow’s fractious, often comical tour of Britain in the autumn of 1945. It paints a picture of two cultures on collision course, despite the spectators’ amazement at the Soviets’ revolutionary style of play and the visitors’ enthusiasm for British football culture.

Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.

In 1984, Winston Smith said that freedom is the right to step back from lies and say that 2 and 2 make 4. But today, even though we are free in Smith’s sense, someone else will say, loudly and repeatedly, that 2 and 2 make 5. And who will separate for us the wheat from the chaff? Therefore free speech is no longer always helpful, as thinkers like Mill and Holmes thought, in which case we must consider how to repair the marketplace for ideas so that we can advance in solid knowledge rather than drown in mere opinions. John Thompson suggested a “Trump Test,” whereby “public language… must distinguish between… grown up political discourse and outright nonsense.” This can be done in two ways. We can wait until our speakers and influencers fix their discourse, which may take many years, or we can fix the information system that conveys to us too many incorrect propositions. If we chose the second option, what needs to be done is clear. We must regulate the use of smart phones so as not to permit them to maintain a conversation that fractures modern society and muddles modern thinking. Of course, to overcome such a pleasant national addiction will require commitment to moderate political activism, and each of us must look for inspiration to that end. Thomas Paine told us that we have the power to remake the world. He did, and so can we.

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.

Who is the audience for social criticism? What goals does it seek to achieve? How do we evaluate performances within this genre? These seemingly simple questions uncover complexities beyond the scope of a single essay, yet they frame the issues addressed here, particularly through the concept of ‘performance’. Social critics often adopt a self-consciously dissident voice, presenting themselves as lonely ‘outsiders’ to emphasise their stance. However, this identity is never straightforward; criticism inherently presupposes a community of potential allies, and every act of dissent simultaneously asserts an alternative authority. One might argue that within every ‘outsider’ lies an ‘insider’ trying to emerge, but this perspective risks solidifying rather than challenging existing categories.This phenomenon is particularly prominent in twentieth-century political writing, where there is a heightened focus on the systemic social and economic forces that reinforce conformity. However, conventional scholarly approaches often overlook the diverse literary expressions of this dynamic, favouring an analysis centred on propositional content. This view assumes that political writing comprises closely argued propositions aimed at securing agreement, dismissing non-propositional elements as decoration or distraction. This chapter’s aim is not to validate or dismiss the dissident voice but to explore the literary strategies that navigate its implicit logic.

This chapter argues that ‘the people’ are dependent upon acts of invocation. Peoples are formed through invocation, whether projective or retrospective, as the people-to-come, or the people deposed and exiled from their just estate (and therefore still the people-to-come in reclaiming their inheritance). If there are always ‘people’, unaddressed, unarticled, going about their business of saying and doing, ‘The People’ always have to be invoked, not just being called on but being called up, or called into being, and summoned into a vocativity that can never be fully their own, since it means having to be given voice or brought to speech in order to speak up for itself. The chapter considers examples of this calling into voice in the work of Shelley, Chesterton, and Orwell.

This chapter documents the mutation of the most preeminent form of non-Jewish defense of Jews since the late nineteenth century. From mere disapproval of prejudice, anti-antisemitism evolved in 1945 into a singular struggle against Jew-hatred. Leftist parties in liberated Western Europe continued to oppose antisemitism in the name of universal antiracism. But in Britain and France, anti-antisemite pioneers such as the Labour MP Richard Crossman, the Anglican scholar James Parkes, and above all the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, reframed antisemitism as a special ill – the problem of “contaminated” non-Jewish society. From London, George Orwell offered the first postwar critique of this view. To single out the Jew as “a species of animals different from ourselves,” he wrote, could only “make antisemitism more prevalent that it was before.” The Parisian thinker’s decisive contribution to “philosemitic Europe,” however, was to turn the “war on antisemitism” into a politics of pro-Jewish solidarity – a progressive stance also accepting of Zionism until 1967 and beyond.

In this chapter, we take up the conceptual relationship between humiliation and glory. We argue that reversing humiliation has often been the cause for which glory is assigned. Leaning on James, Orwell, and Machiavelli, we explore the attraction of political causes in general and suggest that undoing a history of humiliation has a particular grip on the political imagination. We further note that while glory is the reward for ending political humiliation, the sentiment itself is often understood in terms of lost glory. We proceed to argue that the symmetry between the two terms was incomplete: While reversing political humiliation will always win glory, it is possible to become glorious for other causes, completely unrelated to that reversal. In Section 7.4 of the chapter, we note that the humiliation/glory dyad has very different consequences for men and women: While war can be humiliating for both, glory is typically reserved for the men planning and fighting the wars. We conclude by suggesting that a preoccupation with the humiliation/glory dynamic necessarily comes at the expense of the private, intimate milieu of the person who pursues them.

This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

Kuhn claims after a revolutionary change of theory, scientists need to write new textbooks to incorporate the new theoretical perspective. The revisions do not merely involve the addition of the new discoveries. The task involves some rewriting of the history of the discipline. Kuhn suggests there are parallels to Orwell’s 1984. The “new” history of a scientific field is written to emphasize the continuity through the change. This chapter examines the role Kuhn’s comparison to 1984 plays in his argument, and the significance of the rewriting of a discipline’s history after a change of theory. The process tells us something about both how scientists are trained to work effectively and the nature of the changes that occur during a scientific revolution.

This chapter proposes that the representation of animals in contemporary writing is best understood as “literary zoontology”: the portrayal of animal existence, and of sociality among animals and humans, as an intertwined story of the reality of more-than-human life and literary meaning. The framework adopted is principally literary-theoretical. By analyzing some key contemporary critical approaches to making sense of animal life, I argue for attention to the “animal form” of contemporary texts, in which literary animal lives are not dissected into their actual and imaginary, embodied and aesthetic, parts. The analysis then opens onto a key example: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animal form of Animal Farm configures together what are normatively understood as essentially different “kinds” of living and being: human and animal, species and individual, speculative and actual, aesthetic and real. Indeed, focusing through the lens of literary zoontology offers us new ways to discover Orwell’s literary animals within the history of human-animal relations. As such, it is one way that literary reading can take us beyond the human-animal divide.

War intensifies conceptions of national identity, generating unifying models of ‘us’ that can be set against configurations of the enemy ‘other’. As enemies change, so too does the model of the nation that confronts them. Yet, while the nation at war is necessarily protean, the pressure to articulate it as a coherent entity increases. This chapter uses the Second World War as a case study of war’s capacity to reimagine the nation and to generate coercive models of belonging and exclusion. Exploring both British film culture and the writing of cooperation and complaint, the chapter draws on diverse examples to map the mutation of the national ideal from a mythological ‘village England’ to an imagined future for a new generation. This transition from the spatial to the temporal encapsulates the difficulty of finding common ‘national’ ground and viable discourses of patriotism in the aftermath of the First World War.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the censor’s dilemma: the notion that censors in America may wield significant power for a limited time, but ultimately are undone by the principles of free expression embodied in the First Amendment. Because of this, reformers seek to avoid the label of “censor,” even when their goal is to suppress speech. The urge to censor comes from both the political left and the right, yet both sides claim that only their antagonists engage in censorship. Paradoxically, censors exude sanctimony and a sense of certainty, but cannot shake off the taint of illegitimacy in societies devoted to freedom of expression.

The first chapter asks whether there is a threatening slippery slope from William James's pragmatist conception of truth (as presented in his 1907 work, Pragmatism), via Richard Rorty's radical neopragmatism, to Donald Trump's and other populists' fragmentation of the concept of truth, or even ultimately to the destruction of truth depicted in George Orwell's dystopic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose character O'Brien was interestingly analyzed by Rorty in a 1989 essay on Orwell, arguing for the primacy of freedom over truth. The chapter criticizes Rortyan pragmatism by arguing that the concept of freedom also presupposes the concept of truth (and not just the other way round), also suggesting that, despite the unclarity of some of James's original ideas about truth, there is a sound core to the Jamesian conception of the pursuit of truth. It is, furthermore, suggested that the concept of truth may itself receive a plurality of interpretations within a (meta-level) pragmatist understanding of truth, one of them being the realistic correspondence account, which remains highly relevant, e.g., in the context of combatting post-truth politics.