Dipping back into Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn, his essay on England written at the start of WWII. There is gold on every page, in every paragraph even. It's cold-eyed, caustic, and also loving; beautifully written, no waffle and hardly a sentence looks wrong in hindsight.

Take this for example:

"The power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people."

And, on the same page, "In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement."

He refers to Anthony Eden and Lord Halifax as "stuffed shirts" and adds, "As for [Stanley] Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

"Like all other modern people, the English r in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction .. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations."

When he talks about 'the gentleness of English civilization' it reminds me of J. B. Priestley, another interesting lefty of this period, talking about how "it's little England I love".

Having said all this, my initial tweet that 'there is gold on every page' isn't quite true, since in the later sections when he gets more prescriptive, some of his assertions get a bit more questionable. Still well worth a read though.

“The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for v heavily from time to time. But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who've tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good.”

“One thing that's always shown that the English ruling class are *morally* fairly sound, is that in time of war they're ready enough to get themselves killed... What's to be expected of them is .. stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.”