Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 159. Chapters: George Orwell, J. K. Rowling, Sun Yat-sen, Salvador Allende, Alexander Kerensky, Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Clement Attlee, Michael Foot, Tam Dalyell, Tony Benn, Diane Abbott, Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, George Lansbury, Ken Livingstone, Germaine Greer, Evo Morales, Alan García, Bernie Sanders, Eric Heffer, Cornel West, Keir Hardie, Seán O'Casey, John McDonnell, Stafford Cripps, A. Philip Randolph, Dennis Skinner, Ellen Wilkinson, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Lim Kit Siang, Richard Crossman, Bernard Crick, Jean Jaurès, Barbara Ehrenreich, Lars Ohly, G. D. H. Cole, Marina Silva, Mohamed Abdelaziz, Alice Mahon, Dennis Canavan, Michael Harrington, Harry Cohen, Zlatko Lagumdzija, David Taylor, Shulamit Aloni, Karl Kautsky, John Silkin, John Austin, Ian Gibson, Kelvin Hopkins, Bob Wareing, Lynne Jones, Charles Firth, Jeremy Corbyn, Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, Ian Mikardo, David Drew, Frank Cook, Bernie Grant, Neil Gerrard, Alan Simpson, Eric Chester, Michael Clapham, Peter Kormos, John McAllion, Susana Villarán, Mike Wood, David Anderson, Linda Riordan, Maria Fyfe, Phil Sawford, David Hamilton, Heinz Dieterich, Harry Barnes, Llew Smith, Jimmy Wray, Audrey Wise, Motl Zelmanowicz, Carl Davidson, Reg Race, Elaine Smith, Bill Michie, Ulla Hoffmann. Excerpt: Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism. Considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote fiction, polemical journalism, literary criticism and poetry. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945). They have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture, are widely acclaimed. Orwell's influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues. Several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian, now a byword for any draconian or manipulative social phenomenon or concept inimical to a free society, have entered the vernacular. Blair family home at ShiplakeEric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, Bengal Presidency, British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who had married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and he was supported, as an absentee landlord, by a good income from slave plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not, Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Burma where her Fren