Editing Homage to Catalonia (section)

==== Politics ====
Orwell reflected that he "had ''felt'' what socialism could be like"<ref>''The World of George Orwell'', p.72 [[Weidenfeld & Nicolson]], 1971</ref> and, according to biographer [[Gordon Bowker (writer)|Gordon Bowker]], "Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it."{{Sfn|Bowker|2004|p=224}} In a letter to [[Cyril Connolly]], written on 8 June 1937, Orwell said, "At last [I] really believe in Socialism, which I never did before".<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Das |first1=Satyabrata |title=George Orwell: The Man who Saw Tomorrow |date=1996 |language=en |isbn=978-81-7156-435-4 |publisher=Atlantic Publishers & Dist |page=32 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U3hbtomlTIIC&pg=PA32 |access-date=1 November 2021 |archive-date=1 November 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211101002955/https://books.google.com/books?id=U3hbtomlTIIC&pg=PA32 |url-status=live }}</ref> A decade later he wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, ''against'' totalitarianism and ''for'' democratic Socialism, as I understand it."<ref name="RoddenRodden2007">{{cite book|last1=Rodden|first1=John|title=The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x8-fnamQuUkC&pg=PA133|year=2007|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-67507-9|page=133|access-date=1 January 2021|archive-date=21 January 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210121012334/https://books.google.com/books?id=x8-fnamQuUkC&pg=PA133|url-status=live}}</ref>

Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife [[Eileen O'Shaughnessy]]'s narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937,<ref name="newsinger" /> greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not affecting his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

After reviewing Koestler's bestselling ''[[Darkness at Noon]]'', Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism. He soon wrote ''Animal Farm'', "his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism".<ref>[[Paul Foot (journalist)|Foot, Paul]], ''Articles of Resistance'', p. 92.</ref><ref name="dalrymple20190824">{{Cite magazine |last=Dalrymple |first=William |author-link=William Dalrymple (historian) |title=Novel explosives of the Cold War |url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/novel-explosives-of-the-cold-war/ |magazine=The Spectator |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190826033137/https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/novel-explosives-of-the-cold-war/ |archive-date=2019-08-26 }} [https://outline.com/X9SnJv Alt URL] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190827041148/https://outline.com/X9SnJv |date=27 August 2019 }}</ref>