At the George Orwell Centenary Conference, I was placed on a panel of Orwell’s biographers. There is some irony in this, since I had originally intended to talk about Orwell as text, how in the fecundity and brilliance of his writings he seems to be able, like the Bible, to provide justification for such varying points of view. (In 1984 the most striking example was Hitchens versus Podhoretz. In 2003 it is Hitchens versus Menand.). But having discovered that I’d been placed on a panel with biographers, I took that decision as my mandate. I guess, for better or worse, William Abrahams and I became biographers of Orwell although that was not what we had started out being, and various myths-none of them very important-have arisen out of our transformation. If we were Orwell’s biographers, we were in many ways the first; two of three major full biographies are represented on this panel, Michael Shelden having published his Orwell, proudly subtitled, at least in the English edition, The Authorised Biography in 1991 and Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation having appeared in 2000. Bernard Crick’s George Orwell, subtitled on the dust jacket if not on the title page The First Complete Biography, was published in 1980. William Abrahams’s and my The Unknown Orwell appeared in 1972. Our second volume, Orwell: The Transformation, came out in 1979. Such a study seems to emerge approximately once a decade. But in 2003 two new ones appeared: D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The Life and Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell.