CH's erudition on Orwell is very impressive and the smoothness of his acerbity is frequently entertaining. He does answer the question, "Why does Orwell matter?" on the book's last page:
that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

Or, in my own abbreviated summary, Orwell lived an exposed mostly Leftist intellectual life, with occasional vacillations and, in retrospect, some misogyny and homophobia, but he tried to have an honest and rational approach to his convictions.

Hitchens spends some time running down Orwell's fiction, and ultimately I don't think the title's implied question is really answered since I think most of Orwell's readers would respond simply that the reason that he matters is that he wrote well about things that mattter, then and now.

Lastly, in terms of lines of print, this book is mostly Hitchens criticizing the critics of Orwell. This can dry things out rather extensively, and consequently, I did not feel that I was brought closer to Orwell in the same way that I did, for example, in the author's book on Thomas Paine. ( )

I found this book difficult to read, I like Hitchens style and his other writing, this just seemed dry. I read book for enjoyment or when in school because I had to read certain books. Hitchens does look at Orwell from many different points of view. ( )

The iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens provides a portrait of George Orwell that is neither hagiographic nor overly critical. Organized topically there are short essays covering such areas as the left, the right, Empire, America, feminists, and a brief review of the novels. This short study is both useful as an introduction to Orwell, the man, and a review of his life and ideas for those who, like myself, admire the man. ( )

A lucid and readable short biography of George Orwell by one of his most sincere and respectful imitators. Christopher Hitchens' admiration for the writer extended beyond his essays – a path which Hitchens followed – to include an appreciation for the man's general bearing. Orwell, Hitchens writes, was a writer "forever taking his own temperature" (pg. 114); "the outstanding English example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth" (pg. 47).

While not a piece of literary criticism (only the eighth chapter, about twenty pages long, is explicitly dedicated to Orwell's novels), Orwell's Victory is trying throughout to appraise the author's legacy; to demonstrate why (as the American title of the book says) Orwell matters. To do this, Hitchens not only covers Orwell's biography, and his essay and fiction writing, but the depth and origin of his various political opinions. He wades into the various debates surrounding Orwell with formidable fists, remarking on the "body-snatching of Orwell" (pg. 91) by both the left and right wings.

Hitchens' book is not a hagiography, and he does well to prevent it from becoming so. More than just an author to be invoked for political point-scoring or (sometimes apposite) prophetic warnings about totalitarianism, Orwell is shown to be, in Hitchens' account, a flawed but disciplined individual. A writer "sensitive to intellectual hypocrisy" (pg. 6), whether from the left or right, Orwell emerges as someone prescient regarding the challenges of our time, not least "his views on the importance of language, which anticipated much of what we now debate under the rubric of psychobabble, bureaucratic speech, and 'political correctness'" (pg. 10).

The use of apostrophes around the words 'political correctness' in Hitchens' book might seem dated (the book was published in 2002), because of how ubiquitous and accepted that malignancy has since become, but none of the rest of it does. Hitchens takes the opportunity (with appropriate restraint) to rail against contemporary enemies that Orwell might have identified, including an observation on some of the more foolish extremes of postmodernism that remains pertinent:

"It may one day seem strange that, in our own time of extraordinary and revolutionary innovation in the physical sciences, from the human genome to the Hubble telescope, so many 'radicals' spent so much time casting casuistic doubt on the concept of verifiable truth." (pg. 176)

Ultimately, Hitchens succeeds in his attempt to demonstrate why Orwell matters. This sickly writer, who "never enjoyed a stable income, and never had a completely reliable publishing outlet" (pg. 7), has the enviable legacy of perhaps the largest (or at least the broadest) political footprint in English-language letters. With Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he altered "the way in which even relatively unlettered people became aware of the power" and manipulation of political language (pg. 175). And, Hitchens shows through his biographical journey, he operated with the "decent minimum of hypocrisy" (pg. 137). Orwell represents, if not the best English writing, then the best of the spirit of English writing: how an honest man, with a love for honest Saxon words, can, for all the competing influences and prejudices of class, race and personal experience, emerge a rational individual.

And that prescience, that honesty of the writer, is not only not going away, but perhaps becoming even more necessary to acknowledge. Hitchens quotes an immediate post-war essay by Orwell which says: "We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity" (pg. 77). Orwell was referring to the atom bomb and the Cold War, and later developed the idea for the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it says a lot to his diligent maintenance of intellectual honesty (if not to the general character of mankind) that such lines still hold today. We can think of those "horribly stable" slave empires and think on the increasingly unbridgeable gaps between the haves and have-nots in our contemporary society. Even the Covid pandemic did not result in a general breakdown; unlike any other comparable event in history, it did not flip the gameboard and provide opportunity, but in fact entrenched those with existing power. In light of this, and the general realisation that Orwell (and Hitchens) would still have a lot to write about, is it not the case that Orwell still matters – and perhaps more than ever? ( )

Ironically, this is the first book of Hitchens that I have read, but it is also fitting since, like Orwell, he seems to fit none of our tightly defined political orthodoxies. This book is an honest, critical appraisal of George Orwell that examines many of the anti-Orwell critiques. Hitchens concludes: "Orwell's 'views' have been largely vindicated by Time....But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them." ( )