The Crankiness Of Orwell

Julian Barnes nails it:

One of the effects of reading Orwell's essays en masse is to realize how very dogmaticin the nonideological sensehe is. This is another aspect of his Johnsonian Englishness. From the quotidian matter of how to make a cup of tea to the socioeconomic analysis of the restaurant (an entirely unnecessary luxury, to Orwell's puritanical mind), he is a lawgiver, and his laws are often founded in disapproval. He is a great writer against.

So his "Bookshop Memories"a subject others might turn into a gentle color piece with a few amusing anecdotesscorns lightness. The work, he declares, is drudgery, quite unrewarding, and makes you hate books; while the customers tend to be thieves, paranoiacs, dimwits, or, at bestwhen buying sets of Dickens in the improbable hope of reading themmere self-deceivers. In "England Your England" he denounces the left-wing English intelligentsia for being "generally negative" and "querulous": adjectives which, from this distance, seem to fit Orwell pretty aptly. Given that he died at the age of forty-six, it's scary to imagine the crustiness that might have set in had he reached pensionable age.

I've read a lot of Orwell and almost as much about him. This essay captures his Britishness - and avoids hagiography - as well as any I've read.