It is hard to believe how much work Orwell crammed into a short life. He was dead before fifty, and his entire impressive oevre was produced in a period of little over twenty years - indeed this four volume set devotes three volumes to his final decade - devoting much of this volume to what would be described as juvenilia were he not in his thirties by the time he started wrting.

It is all good stuff, however, full of precise observation, and robust common sense. The portrait that emerges is that of a frustrated bibliophile - a man who would love just to lose himself in the appreciation of fine literature, but is forced despite himself, to engage in politics. The subtitle "An Age like This" is from a poem reproduced in the first piece. It is a bad poem - poetry was not really Orwell's strength - but has a few striking lines in it. He"was born alas in an evil time" and "was not made for an age like this".

There is, it should be said, enough material in here to satisy fy the devil's advocate in opposing Orwell's canonisation. His own belief - and that of his admirers - that he was the only person willing to tell the real truth about Spain does not stand up to scrutiny. From 1937 to 1939 he was espousing a peculiar ultra-left tendency that not only denounced the Soviets as counter-revolutionaries - there is a good argument for that - but opposed preparation for war with Germany apparently on the grounds that the Communists wanted it. He even went so far as to talk of the "anti-Fascist racket".

But he got a lot more right than he got wrong. And his epitaph must be "everything I have written has been against fascism and for democratic socialism".