The ethical purpose sharpened the aesthetic means, he makes clear, and politics saved him from insignificance. “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” But pamphleteer was neither a bad job nor one without aesthetic demands and pleasures: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. . . . I write . . . because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I
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