George Orwell was the author of six novels, three works of non-fiction, and countless essays, articles and letters. Born Eric Blair in 1903, he served in the Imperial Police in Burma, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and worked as a literary editor and for the BBC before and during World War II. In 1946 he wrote: ‘What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.’ Few would disagree that Orwell achieved this with his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949 and written while he was suffering the tuberculosis which would take his life just months later.