George Orwell Eton Blair displayed a "sceptical attitude" to Christian belief. Crick observed that Orwell displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism". Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life." His contradictory and sometimes ambiguous views about the social benefits of religious affiliation mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his unbelief while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained religiosity". Orwell liked
George Orwell living conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division generally) and "Homage to Catalonia". According to Irving Howe, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson." Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is often compared to "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of