George Orwell with his son in 1946. Photograph: Veina Richards

My hero: George Orwell by John Carey

Orwell was a truth-teller whose courage and sense of social justice made him a secular saint

Friday 28 March 2014

I

admire Orwell for how he lived as well as for how he wrote. He would have sneered at the notion that he was a saint – he once described the Christian heaven as "choir practice in a jeweller's shop". All the same, for me he was a secular saint. His road-to‑Damascus moment came when he resigned from the Indian Imperial police in 1927. He was aware, he said, of an "immense weight of guilt" he had to expiate, so he joined the beggars and outcasts, as described in Down and Out in Paris and London and "How the Poor Die".