Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom.

• Author: Feeney, Matthew

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Thomas E. Ricks

New York: Penguin Press, 2017, 349 pp.

At first glance, a dual biography of Winston Churchill and Eric Blair--who went by the pen name George Orwell--sounds like a project that shouldn't be pursued. After all, Churchill was an upper-class imperialist politician who disdained socialism. Orwell, a committed socialist, was a struggling novelist and journalist for most of his life. The two men never met each other and moved in very different circles.

And yet both men were among the few to correctly foretell the dangers of the two greatest threats to human freedom in the 20th century: nazism and communism. This shared prescience and the two men's steadfast and oftentimes lonely opposition to these two tyrannies are the focus of Thomas E. Ricks's latest book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom.

Ricks's book opens by noting another similarity between the two men: they were both almost killed before achieving notoriety. During the Spanish Civil War, a Nationalist sniper shot Orwell in the neck while he was fighting with the anti-Stalin POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification). Miraculously, the bullet missed his spinal cord, arteries, and windpipe. Orwell also survived the Soviet-backed repression of the POUM.

A New York City cab driver struck Churchill at around 30 miles an hour in 1931. At the time, Churchill was enduring what he called his "wilderness years" of political isolation and was in America hoping to pick up some speaking fees following the financial crisis of 1929. The cab dragged Churchill down the street, cracking ribs and cutting his scalp. And, during the Second Boer War, a young Churchill survived a prisoner of war camp (that he later escaped) and was at the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan.

As Ricks notes, had Churchill and Orwell been killed in Spain, South Africa, Sudan, or New York they would be remembered by only a few historians specializing in minor British politicians and literary figures. Fortunately, Churchill and Orwell survived their brushes with death, going on to become two of the last century's most influential figures.

Achieving such influence was not, however, without significant obstacles. Churchill had to contend with broad support for appeasing Hitler. The First World War, which led to the deaths of 886,000 British military personnel, had only concluded roughly two decades before Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Many in Britain were...