It is not just another side of Orwell that you read about, but his very core

GGeorge Orwell loved roses. He grew them in his small village garden south of London while Europe trembled with turmoil and war, and it is no coincidence that the main act of resistance in his most famous novel ‘1984’ is when the main characters, Winston and Julia, make love in the open .

We are used to seeing Orwell as the anti-fascist who wrote novels about a terrible future, but historian Rebecca Solnit adds layers that expand the picture, because Orwell turns out to really need green fingers when he wrote.