Other writers were lined up, including Michael Foot, Cyril Connelly and Arthur Koestler.

The stated aim of Searchlight Books was to appeal to a new generation who ‘can recognise the spirit of the new world’. The book was published by Secker & Warburg as the first of a new imprint of ‘Searchlight Books’ (there’s the Blitz, again), with Orwell and TR Fyvel as editors. He believes ‘anyone able to read a map knows we are in deadly danger’ and the answer is straightforward, if paradoxical: “We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.” The first sentence, written in the present tense, conveys the urgency of his argument. The same can be said of The Lion and the Unicorn. It is written because there is something that one wants to say now…” In 1948, Orwell described the purpose of writing a political pamphlet as being: “Never written primarily to give entertainment or to make money. A change, since he believed Britain was losing the war because working people were not in the saddle, and vital, because he abhorred the totalitarianism that a Nazi conquest would herald. Orwell’s motive was not a lasting work of literature, but an immediate, and to his mind vital, change of policy. This context – Hitler, Dunkirk, the Blitz – is everything. His own home in Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn was hit by a flying bomb in 1944, destroying it completely and burying the manuscript of Animal Farm in the rubble. Orwell’s wartime diaries are filled with air raids, shelters, shattered glass and casualties. The threat of death with which he begins his book is more than a rhetorical flourish. It was published in February 1941, as the Junkers and Heinkels filled the night skies.

Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn (‘very quickly’ according to his editor Tosco Fyvel) in London and at Scarlett’s Farm in Berkshire, in mid to late 1940 at the height of the Battle of Britain. Perhaps the most important sentence in George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius is the opener: “As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

George orwell patriotism