When you go out first on your own. When you marry and settle. When your father dies. When your son leaves home.

He’s studying Wales,’ Eira said, ’and he goes to London to do it.

When you’re young,’ Harry said, ’you just see things. There’s nothing much to say about them. You don’t realize then all the life that’s gone into it.

That a life lasts longer than the actual body through which it moves.

It wasn’t idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

The total effect of Orwell’s work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.

There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.

The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure, however active we may be, we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.