Down and Out in Paris and London

The thief who took the last of an ailing George Orwell’s money from his Paris room in 1929 did a big favour to political literature.Vanessa Thorpe, Observer

Little that Orwell has written, here and elsewhere, has lost the hum of relevancy, from the causes of poverty and its long-term effects – “it annihilates the future” – to its everyday toll of boredom.Laurence Mackin, Irish Times

Down and Out is an extraordinary and curious book: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest and funny. George Orwell’s 1933 memoir, and a study of poverty, is a book both rooted in its era and able to transcend it.Independent

Orwell’s is a plea for empathy for the laborer, the tramp, and the impoverished . . . [it] is a fascinating anthropological study of poverty, its empirical value tarnished by its richly entertaining prose, and overt imposition of Orwell’s political dispositions upon his observations.Medium