kindred spirits.................................

      On the surface, the two men were quite different.  Churchill was more robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen years.  But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits.  In their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men grapples with the same great questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its preemption of Britain.  They responded with the same qualities and tools—their intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words.  And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.

-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom