The factions and characters populating George Orwell’s account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War may now seem distant, but Homage to Catalonia remains one of the world’s most clear-sighted works of reportage and reflection. Orwell, a committed socialist, signed up to fight Franco’s fascists but found himself on the wrong side of a Soviet-authored purge of those in the Republican ranks in Barcelona who disagreed with Stalinist communism. His contempt for the lies, thuggishness, brutality and cynicism of men in uniform and in power — regardless of their political commitment — shines through and would later morph into his allegorical tale Animal Farm. His political insights seem as relevant now as they were more than half a century ago, and there are few better craftsmen of the English language than Orwell. Here’s a line from the battlefront: “When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings.”