Orwell wasn't a literary letter-writer, to judge from this selection; that is, he never inserted paper into a typewriter's platten with intent to impress or enthral his reader through style or subject. All his communications (and those of his first wife, Eileen, including her last note interrupted by the death she didn't expect) tend to the practical, full of tight budgets and potato-planting. Now and again, there's a personal revelation, such as his 1946 epistle to a young neighbour proposing not so much that she should become his second wife, and stepmother to his adopted son, as a trainee "widow to a literary man", who might "find it interesting to edit unpublished stuff". (She declined.) And his dispatches from the Isle of Jura describe an unimagined aspect of the postwar age of austerity: he lived on lobster, venison and fresh-churned butter, but lacked bread, rationed at the time. His books are prefigured in casual asides – room 101 (Nineteen Eighty-Four's terror zone) turns out to be where the BBC brass held their dreary meetings.