The essay is concerned with freedom of thought and expression, particularly in an environment where the prevailing orthodoxy in left-wing intellectual circles is in favour of the communism of the Soviet Union.
[1] In his essay Orwell recalls attending a PEN meeting a year previously on the tercentenary of John Milton's Areopagitica which included the phrase "killing a book".
Orwell introduces his essay by recalling a meeting of the PEN Club, held on the 300-year anniversary of Milton's Areopagitica in defence of freedom of the press, in which the speakers appeared to be interested primarily in issues of obscenity and in presenting eulogies of Soviet Russia and concludes that it was really a demonstration in favour of censorship.
He declares the immediate enemies of freedom of thought in England to be the concentration of the press in a few hands, monopoly of radio, bureaucracy and the unwillingness of the public to buy books.
Orwell cites the Ukrainian famine, the Spanish Civil War and Poland as topics that the pro-Soviet writers fail to address because of the prevailing orthodoxy and sees organised lying as integral to totalitarian states.
He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind.Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set.