“That voice—once you’ve heard it, how do you get it out of your head?” So writes Keith Gessen in his introduction to this new collection of George Orwell’s critical essays. Like many admirers before him, Gessen—himself a lively and effective critic as well as a novelist—pays tribute to Orwell’s writing as “clear,” “plain,” “sharp,” and “strong.” In doing so, he registers the influence, on yet another generation, of one of literature’s most famous prose stylists.

Orwell has been around a lot in the past few years, in part because of the recent publication of Peter Davison’s awe-inspiring complete edition, but also because he survives as an embodiment of intellectual integrity and democratic vigilance, even after the end of the Cold War. Orwell is still, to use his own description of Dickens, a writer “well worth stealing.” Christopher Hitchens, for one, agrees, having tried to appropriate him for his campaigns against both “Islamofascism” and his former comrades on the left.

All Art Is Propaganda was compiled by New Yorker staff writer George Packer, who, as a powerful opponent of America’s occupation of Iraq, understandably looks to Orwell as a fellow “essayist with a cause.” (This phrase comes from Packer’s foreword, which makes a case for the best kind of journalistic writing in times of “partisanship and upheaval.”) The volume brings together pieces Orwell wrote on literature and art in the 1940s, but what is striking, if not surprising, is just how saturated with political commentary these cultural essays are. Lurking within almost all of them is Orwell’s wartime and postwar obsession with encroaching totalitarianism, and the weaknesses he thought would ensure its arrival. “We are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships,” he writes in his celebrated 1940 essay about Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale.” Then adds ominously, “The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.”

There was, he believed, no “keeping out of politics,” whatever he was writing about. Several well-known essays in this collection take the form of Orwell scrutinizing something he had grown up with—Dickens, boys’ comics, Kipling—and working out the political influence they are likely to have had, on him and in general. Dickens, he decides, is a classic 19th-century liberal; one who prefers moral to political revolution (a “change of heart” man). But the final sentence of his analysis strikes a strange note: Orwell lauds Dickens as “a free intelligence,” which makes him “a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” This is literary criticism played for high stakes.

In the same essay on Dickens he says that “every novelist has a ‘message,’ whether he admits to it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.” This isn’t as narrow as it sounds. Orwell mostly means that all art comes from somewhere and expresses a particular worldview; he is arguing against naive aesthetes and others who believe they are ideologically neutral. Yet he holds tight to the notion of “a free intelligence,” and constantly asks what a writer might do to keep literature alive in a totalitarian world.

Orwell was “intrigued” by Henry Miller’s lack of interest in the Spanish civil war: it was the reverse of his own instinct, yet he preferred Miller’s rebellious quietism to the Communist-tinged literature of the 1930s (Auden, Spender, Edward Upward), with its deference to the party line. As Gessen says, the message of “Inside the Whale” is that “while all art is propaganda, it needn’t necessarily propagandize something correct. The important thing is that the writer himself believe it.”

Salvador Dalí represents another kind of escape, not into quietism, but into “wickedness.” Orwell detested the painter—in whose character he felt that “the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist”—not only for his “immoral” work, but because he abandoned France in 1940 for the US. The essay on Dalí also casts Orwell in an unflattering light, as too much of le bloke moyen sensuel (to quote Stefan Collini), and as someone who filters culture rather too easily through political biography.