One of the things I most enjoy about George Orwell is his love of tobacco. It was essential to him all his life, even near the end when his lungs were failing (Nineteen Eighty-Four was typed up on Jura in a bedroom hazy with cigarette smoke). My preferred instance of this love, however, is his lament in Homage to Catalonia that, on the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War, ‘[t]he shortage of tobacco was the worst of all’ – not, you note, the shortages of food and clothes (or the threat of Fascist snipers).