Life & Wisdom Quote by George Woodcock

A backhanded tribute like this is Woodcock at his most revealing: he sketches Orwell as a man powered less by serene reason than by emotional voltage. “Full of grievances” doesn’t just mean cranky; it hints at a moral sensor set permanently to high gain, the kind that turns ordinary slights into evidence of systemic rot. Woodcock, who knew Orwell in the anarchist and socialist milieus of mid-century London, is capturing the engine behind the prose: indignation refined into clarity.

Then comes the pivot to loyalty, repeated for emphasis. The doubling (“very loyal... extremely loyal”) reads like a defense brief, as if Woodcock anticipates the charge that Orwell was difficult, judgmental, or socially abrasive. Loyalty becomes the humanizing counterweight to grievance: yes, he could be harsh, but he wasn’t fickle. Once you were in, you were in. That’s an intimate claim, and it matters because Orwell’s politics were defined by betrayals and defections - from empire, from party lines, from comforting orthodoxies.

“Hated passionately and irrationally” is the sharpest line, and it’s doing two jobs at once. It punctures the saintly image of Orwell as pure-eyed truth-teller, while also acknowledging the combustible fuel behind his greatest work. Orwell’s disgust at hypocrisy and authoritarianism could look like personal vendetta, not just analysis. Woodcock’s subtext is that the famous “plain style” didn’t come from cool detachment; it came from a temperament that needed enemies to stay awake. The intent isn’t to diminish Orwell so much as to explain the cost of being the kind of writer whose conscience never clocks out.