"The Road to Wigan Pier" came in for criticism in its day from right and left.

Conservatives, of course, thought it was a piece of Bolshevik trash, but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic, a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.

None of this prevented "The Road to Wigan Pier" from being a massive best seller. Why?

Well, Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it. Instead, he made a real work of literature.

When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses, you know you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression, someone who could make you hear, see and feel the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.

You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.

One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley laud Fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.

To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley ended up cheering him.

A fight was coming, and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, were too gutless to join in.

What was their message? Peace in our time, or please do your business somewhere else while we get on with hoeing the garden.