Deserves to be up there with Animal Farm and 1984, which seem much more popular in the public mind. The nonfictional context for why the author felt motivated to write those two other books. It seems like there has been a long pro-war vein among conservatives, and plenty of antiwar books on the left; I have read and enjoyed examples from both, but Orwell is one of the people who is both leftwing and happy to endorse violence. Very different feeling in this book than in, for example, many of Kurt Vonnegut's stories. I don't mean to take a position here since I haven't fought in such a war, but it is definitely interesting to see two authors discuss a similar time frame (midcentury antifascist violence) with very different points of view, while still being broadly on the same side of the political spectrum. Favorite anecdote from the book: Orwell visits the Sagrada Familia which he feels is so ugly that he wishes it had been blown up like all the other Spanish churches in areas controlled by the leftist militias. Unfortunately for him, it had been exempted since it was such a fine example of forward looking architecture...