Vanity Fair | August 2012
By Christopher Hitchens
George Orwell’s best-known work (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) emerged from painstaking investigation. In the introduction to a groundbreaking volume of Orwell’s diaries, V.F.’s late columnist dissects one of the 20th century’s greatest political minds, a writer who was also his lifelong inspiration.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/08/christopher-hitchens-george-orwell