Dear George,

Until you entered my life, I vaguely imagined I would become a professor much like those whom I had admired as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, a specialist in Wordsworth's Prelude or a scholar who had mastered the minutiae of literary modernism. Your work and legacy have served as my introduction to intellectual life, indeed my passport to contemporary cultural history.

I am often asked what it was that drew me to you. After all, I've been reading and pondering your work for a long time. Indeed, I've written hundreds of pages about your writings, and I've returned to them again during the editing for this Cambridge Companion to your work. The answer that I find myself giving is that you inspired me - because you lived what you wrote and you wrote out of the depths of your experience.

As I delved more deeply into your life and work, I also discovered a few surprising personal links between us. In fact, my father worked as a day labourer just two miles away from the Gloucestershire working-class hospital in Scotland in which you convalesced. His peasant father in County Donegal, Ireland felt sympathy with Irish nationalists (like Sean O'Casey, whom you reviled) and flirted with communism. Certainly you would have castigated my grandfather as a knee-jerk socialist and an Irish revolutionary agitator. (And what about me? Would you, George Orwell, have liked me? I'm a vegetarian, a sandal-wearing religious believer, an Irishman, a Catholic. The odds are against it!)