"He was not a revolutionary. He had no hatred of the past, and no confidence that a golden millennium could be created by abrupt political action... Worse still—and this is where Orwell parts company not only with the doctrinaire Left-wing systems of the Continent, but with the New Statesman-reading progressives of N.W.3—he was anti-modern. He aligned himself with Socialism, which naturally tends to see the past as an evil, to be broken away from—naturally, since human history is, undeniably, largely a tale of cruelty, exploitation and injustice. But where the average Socialist cannot wait to throw the past on the dung-heap, Orwell loved it, hankered for it, longingly re-created it in his mind. As an artist, his best passages—indeed, his only passages which gave the genuine, unforced glow of imagination—flower from pure nostalgia. As a political thinker, he is at his most useful, and most zestful, when he is warning us of the hell we could so easily make for ourselves. Orwell's distrust of the steel-and-concrete, streamlined, collectivised future is well known to everyone... It is this distrust, more than anything else, that explains the hatred felt for him by "progressives" with their money on the future and their heads full of Revolution."