"A Wild—and One Can Only Assume Willful—Misinterpretation"

"And when it comes to political writing, Orwell's position remains unassailable. 'In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,' he writes, a sentence any writer has cause to envy. 'Politics and the English Language' is directed not at, say, suppressing the vernacular English of disenfranchised black Americans, as Self preposterously alleges, but at dispersing the fog of 'euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness' generated by the powerful and their mouthpieces to obscure the truth."


In Salon, Laura Miller responds to Will Self's criticism of George Orwell.