[2] Orwell notes that a novel written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter of Paris seems an unlikely candidate to be a novel of outstanding value at the time, as its mental atmosphere belongs to the 1920s rather than the 1930s.
After Housman and the nature poets there was a new movement of the 1920s of unrelated writers with a similar outlook such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey.
In addition to the common ground of anti-fascism he sees that after the debunking of Western civilisation and the disappearance of traditional middle class values and aspirations, people need something to believe in and Communism has replaced Catholicism as the escapist ideal.
Orwell identifies another factor which is the softness and security of life in England against which the secret police and summary executions are too remote to be frightening.
He cites Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise for whom the key eventful period in his life was his public school education – "five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery".
Referring again to the great war Orwell notes the surviving readable works are those written from a passive negative angle and he highlights Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.
Orwell predicts the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture and suggests that any novel worth reading will have to follow the lines of Miller's work.
During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchers and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen.To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders.
Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents.. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries someone else) seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded together in public-schools and were half-inclined to think of women as something unattainable.Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and exiled counts driving taxis.
[4] Montefiore argues that Inside the Whale "anticipates Cold War condemnations of 'premature anti-fascists'" by regarding all the left-wing writers of the period "as uniform tools or stooges of Moscow".