This is a book about the ordinariness of George Orwell, which comes on the back of another book, edited by Nathan Waddell, about an Orwell so extraordinary that he warrants 848 pages to himself. In that work, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, the famous writer is stuffed like a goose. A Bright Cold Day, on the other hand, is a slender blade that cuts to the bone of a man who thought not only that he was ordinary but that you were ordinary too.

Orwell did not want any fuss. The lowly talks assistant at the BBC would have been astonished – upset, even – at the sight of an eight-foot statue of himself on a plinth outside Broadcasting House. When he went to fight in Spain, he signed on as ‘grocer’. When he worked in a Hampstead bookshop, he said it was a place where you could hang about and not spend any money. When he worked in a Parisian hotel kitchen, he couldn’t help thinking about the fingering of the meat. A Bright Cold Day puts Orwell in the cheap seats. Here is the curious, down-at-heel scribbler who went north in search of working-class heroes and found a young woman on her knees in the cold trying to unblock a waste pipe with a stick.

Waddell takes Orwell’s daily routine – rising, washing, breakfast, work, lunch, walking, more walking, hobbies, pub, dinner, sleep – and makes a life out of it. Let’s go walking. When J B Priestley took to the road while working on his English Journey in 1933, he travelled some of the