I was introduced to Bernard-Henri Lévy this spring at a stop on his latest book tour. It was a few minutes before he was due to face the audience. After a polite hello, he turned to the organizer of the event and asked, "How many people in the hall?" The organizer named a respectable figure. Lévy responded with a menacing glare: "Why so few? Your explanation?" This jaw-dropping exchange reminded me of the first lines of Lévy's book on French intellectuals: "The scene opens in Paris, at the beginning of the eighties, with the funeral cortège of a famous person--but whose?" By making us guess--Sartre? Foucault?--Lévy seemed to be saying that the occupant of the hearse could be anyone; what's important is the size of the crowd. Imagine--all these people gathered to pay their respects to...a thinker! How cool to be gawked at. How cool to be an intellectual, even a dead one.

George Orwell had a quiet funeral, on a frigid January day in an unheated London church. Faithful to his subject's modesty, D.J. Taylor does not tell us how large the congregation was. Orwell too had become famous, but only when he was dying and unable to enjoy it. Once he was gone, the sufferings to which he had exposed himself on his expeditions among the poor and while fighting fascism in Spain crystallized, under the pressure of the cold war, into a sort of secular, antitotalitarian sainthood. But his conspicuous saintliness has also invited more cynical interpretations. Scott Lucas's is one of these. Lucas reminds us that this "defender of free thought and clear prose" and "foe of Big Brother" metamorphosed during World War II into an English patriot who, upon request, submitted an annotated list of leftist sympathizers to British intelligence. Lucas's Orwell is too intent on acting the role of the heroically unaffiliated individual to keep faith with the common people or with socialism. Lucas can't quite bring himself to say that Orwell's withdrawal from leftist politics was a clever career move. But he comes close.

Much of this has already been argued by Orwell's earlier critics. The novelty of The Betrayal of Dissent lies in Lucas's enlargement of the accusation to take in Christopher Hitchens and other erstwhile left-wing supporters of the "war on terror." Hitchens, former Nation columnist and author of Why Orwell Matters, has repeatedly claimed Orwell's mantle. Lucas has no objection. Both Orwell and Hitchens, he says, repudiated their affiliations with the left amid the nationalist fervor of World War II and post-9/11 and threw in their lot with an arrogant empire. Each was finally less interested in changing the world than in playing solitary hero before a star-struck audience. Hitchens's "master-stroke," Lucas says, is an imitation of Orwell's: seizing for himself "the role of the honourable loner."

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