When [the critic] Woodcock compared Orwell to Antaeus, who draws his strength from the earth, he might have also meant that he drew his intellectual strength from the specific and the tangible and from firsthand experience. It set him at odds with an era in which ideologies led many astray, not least as doctrines defending authority and delegitimizing dissent and independence.
From “Orwell’s Roses,” by Rebecca Solnit
Kit Stolz 