If there’s any question of George Orwell’s legacy, one need only read the newspaper. Recently, politicians have used “Orwellian” to describe the government’s proposed Operation TIPS, which would encourage U.S. citizens to report suspicious activity; the possible fingerprinting of visitors to the United States; and even laws intended to curb “soft money” donations to political campaigns.

“Not bad for one short lifetime,” Christopher Hitchens says in praising Orwell, author of “Animal Farm” and “1984,” who didn’t even see the last half of the 20th century. But in “Why Orwell Matters,” Hitchens suggests it’s Orwell’s character, not only his writings, that proves his relevance.

Orwell, a committed socialist, fiercely opposed and criticized imperialism, fascism and Stalinism, which Hitchens calls “the three great subjects of the twentieth century.” He discovered during the Spanish Civil War “that the Communist strategy relied very heavily upon the horror and terror of anonymous denunciation, secret informing, and police espionage,” Hitchens says, which sparked his breaking with the left.

Because this led him to speak as an individual rather than through an ideology, Hitchens argues, Orwell can be valued “as the outstanding English example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth.”

Hitchens, who recently made his own much-publicized break with the left, is one of today’s foremost polemicists. His brilliance lies in relentless interrogation of language. While the breadth of his knowledge and his command of sources can be intimidating, his analyses of Orwell’s writings, particularly his close reading of the novels, entertain and enlighten.

Hitchens writes as if speaking extemporaneously, and this breezy style will make the book accessible for some. But this informality can lead to detours and obscure historical references. The uninitiated may struggle to retain the basics of Orwell’s biography.

“Why Orwell Matters” is less about why he is relevant today than about Hitchens’ saving the writer from critics, reclaiming him from supporters and engaging debates on empire, political correctness and the role of language in society.

Hitchens effectively defends Orwell from critics on the left. Salman Rushdie, for example, suggests in a 1984 essay that Orwell, in painting a picture of passive masses, advocates “ideas that can only be of service to our masters.”

But Orwell never suggested the people should merely accept political repression, Hitchens retorts: “It is so evidently not his own view that one does not need the evidence — a desperate last decade of activism and commitment to democracy and decolonization, and the writing of two novels with an urgent anti-totalitarian tone — of his own career in order to refute it.”

While Hitchens takes on leftist detractors individually, he suggests that many of them reviled Orwell because he was never taken in by Stalinism — in other words, they’re jealous of his “intellectual honesty.”

As for the right, Hitchens says conservatives lay claim to Orwell because of their shared opposition to totalitarianism, but they have demonstrably different outlooks. In a deft analysis, Hitchens argues that many who suggest that totalitarian states could one day rule the world actually glamorize those regimes. Orwell believed, to the contrary, that they would necessarily fail.

“The disputes and debates and combats in which George Orwell took part are receding into history,” Hitchens smartly notes, and perhaps he should have taken this to heart by examining more specifically how Orwell might be useful today.

A footnote illustrates what this book could have been. Hitchens includes an excerpt from Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” which he says is relevant in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks: “There is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.” It’s a sentiment not unlike those found in Hitchens’ recent writings on the Internet magazine Slate.

The book would have benefited from more such examples, as terrorism is arguably defining a new era.