George Orwell, Politics and the English Language and the strange art of writing sentences that refuse to grow old
There is something peculiar about reading George Orwell. You can pick up an essay written eighty or ninety years ago, settle into the first paragraph and almost immediately forget how old it is. The clothes have changed. The politics have certainly changed, and the references sometimes need explaining.
But the voice seems to arrive without having travelled through time at all. Orwell sounds as though he's sitting across the table from us, slightly impatient, about to explain something that ought to have been obvious in the first place. It's one of the main reasons why I find myself going back to Orwell again and again.