We will explore the essays of George Orwell. Orwell famously read out substantial portions of Mein Kampf in his BBC radio series, in the middle of the war, discussing the dangers of Hitler's subversion of truth to the expediency of propaganda. He no less famously demonstrated how extreme right and extreme left share an identical hatred of freedom of thought, and argued that, without free speech, life was a form of slavery, or an appeasement of thugs. His essays are a continuous endeavour to think for oneself, 'outside the box'. He explores the Spanish Civil War, boys' weeklies, anti-Semitism in Britain, debasement of language, toads. You will need 'George Orwell: Essays' ISBN 978-0-141-18306-0 (Penguin). Please note that this course is not a Current Affairs class. Our focus will be on Orwell's ideas per se, both for their own sake and as ways of conceptualizing how society can become unfree.