A sobering book - Rated 
George Orwell felt awkward for being middle class, once he started to make a bit of money as an author this added to his awkwardness and he spent a lot of time in dank and impoverished surroundings.
This book is largely autobiographic, it tells of his time spent with the homeless. Orwell would pretend to be a tramp, not just pretend - he would live as a tramp from time to time. It was his time as a tramp that feed the ideas in this book.
Orwell writes about the camaraderie in the tramp community with warmth, you can feel his fondness for the people he is writing about.
The tramp experience covers only the second part of the book.
The first part describes the life of Parisian hotel/restaurant kitchen workers. It isn't glamorous. It is a life devoid of love, warmth, and happiness. Boris is the star of the "Paris" part of this book.
This is not only one of Orwell's finest pieces of work, it is a book that changes how you feel about life. When I read this book I was struggling financially - but this book put things in perspective, and I still imagine scenes in this book when times are hard.
The contrast between the "Paris" and "London" aspects of the book couldn't be more different, even though both are concerning that corner of society who seem to have nothing.
Read this book on the bus/train on the commute to work and you'll get lost in the dark visuals it inspires. The book had many place names and people's names removed for fear of being libellous, at first this seems clumsy but you get used to it.
Down and Out - read it - Rated
If ever there was a book deserving the title 'modern classic', this is it. A thought provoking and subtle collection of anecdotes that will make you laugh and out loud and balk at the extremes of poverty described in equal measure. The fact that Orwell avoides self indulgence and manages to evoke a genuine sense of compassion is truely remarkable and whatever your political orientation, having read this book it is hard to feel anything but respect for the man.
Despite its age, down and out still strikes a resonant chord in the modern world and while much has changed in the intervening years, there are still enough parralels with todays society to make you take stock of the world we live in.
I greatly enjoyed this book and recommend everyone to read it.
La Vache Enragée - Rated 
George Orwell, whose real name is Eric Blair, was born in India in 1903. He served in Burma with the Indian Imperial Police and spent the end of the 1920s - as any self-respecting author would've done - living in Paris . Orwell later fought for the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He became well-known following the publication of "Animal Farm" (a satire on Soviet Russia) and died in 1950, shortly after the publication of "1984".
"Down and Out in Paris and London " was first published in 1933 and is a largely autobiographical account - though there have been a few tweaks here and there. It covers Orwell's times living on the breadline : working as a plongeur in Paris, being caught out by con-artists and life as a tramp on his return to England. The book was originally called "A Scullion's Diary" and - it would appear - focused only on his days in Paris . After it was rejected a few times, Orwell tried his luck with the stories of his life on the streets in and around London added. To be honest, I find it a pity this happened, as the stories set in Paris are much more readable. While some of the characters we meet - Charlie, for example - are far from admirable, Orwell himself doesn't come out of the book entirely unscathed. His occasional foolishness is forgivable, but his apparent snobbery and insincerity can be a bit hard to take. For example, as the book closes, he comments he'd like to know people like Paddy (a fellow tramp he'd met in England ) "intimately". However, on the very same page, the news of Paddy's apparent death is met with barely a shrug of the shoulders : "perhaps my informant was mixing him up with someone else". More honestly, it's clear from how he wrote about Paddy that Orwell considered himself better than his 'mate' and - rather than getting to know him intimately - just didn't care.
Recommended with reservations : if you only read two books by George Orwell, make this your third pick.
The poverty classic, timeless - Rated
Orwell lived the life. Remember watching the movie 'Moulin Rouge' and seeing the romantic vision of a struggling artist bashing out words on a typewriter, plagued by poverty and alcoholism one moment only to be feted as a genius the next. This was a reality for Orwell, though he did not enjoy the overnight success Ewen McGregor managed in the movie. What is interesting is that Orwell noted his experiences. He sought out new places to see and experience in a headlong rush into the reality of poverty. He found a humanity amongst the poor that was never present in the wealthy and documents this without patronising them as a class. This is one of the best studies of poverty and its reality within the twentieth century and should be studied by any reader with an interest in how we ended up in the present situation.
Down and Out... - Rated 
Unfussy, journalistic, swift and very, very witty. The word that seems most frequently attributed to Orwell's writing is 'lucidity', and it's an attribute evidenced nowhere more brilliantly than in 'Paris and London'. The writing reminds me of Maugham at his best; both have the invigorating talent of delivering an observation or opinion of glass-like precision in the most succinct of ways before efficiently moving on to something else. Both also have a distinct and distinctly refreshing absence of self-indulgent prose. I read this in one sitting. Haven't done that with a book since I first picked up 'The Old Man and the Sea'. A really good book, though after the scruffy charm of Paris, London and 'Britishness' in general does seem a bit dull.
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