Churchill & Orwell: the fight for freedom. Thomas E. Ricks. 2017.

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930s - Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they’d died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the twentieth century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat. In a crucial moment, they responded - first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscation s, and then by acting on their beliefs. In doing so, they helped keep the West’s compass set toward freedom as its due north.

It’s not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930s, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were in the ascent everywhere. Some decried the scourge of communism but saw in Hitler and Mussolini ‘men we could do business with’ - if not, in fact, saviors. Others saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom - that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted.

In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved to be their age’s necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwellis the work they both did in the 1940s in opposition to freedom’s enemies. Though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell’s reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its fifty year course - and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day.