It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor....

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two s...

‘We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.’ As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed...

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it. When Chesterton wrote h...

Summer—like for an instant the aut… And the light through the turning… It slants down the path and ragged… Fiery again, last flames of the dy… A blue—tit darts with a flash of w…

Brush your teeth up and down, brot… Oh, brush them up and down! All the folks in London Town Brush their teeth right up and dow… Oh! How they shine!

You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few p...

A happy vicar I might have been Two hundred years ago To preach upon eternal doom And watch my walnuts grow; But born, alas, in an evil time,

The chestnut tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens....

Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington’s shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned ...