It would be an understatement to say that George Orwell was obsessed with class. His best-known works were devoted to charting class divisions, customs and fractures. This is most conspicuous in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, which reported on the fissure and bitter antagonism between the peasants and ultra-left workers, who adhered to a brand of anarcho-communism, and conservative, middle-class types, who allied themselves to Moscow. It’s there in Animal Farm, too. In that cautionary tale, the theme was the exploitation and betrayal of a naive, ostensible ‘proletariat’ by a corruptible and corrupt ‘pig’ class, which grew more to resemble its erstwhile masters with each passing moment.

Orwell often wrote of the cleavage between well-to-do socialists and the working class in Britain. He castigated the shallowness, aloofness and sneering snobbery of this country’s left-wing intellectuals. In his 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, he famously wrote that the ‘really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia’ was ‘their severance from the common culture of the country’.

In a passage that has become cliché (but bears repeating today as we are once more witnessing a spasm of far-left, middle-class anti-patriotism), Orwell said: ‘They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought.’