Kristian Williams' Between the Bullet and the Lie: Essays on Orwell offers a diverse set of reflections on the prolific writer. Williams' essays on Orwell are a mixed bag. A self-proclaimed anarchist, Williams offers a combination of literary reflections on the man and his work, along with what he aspires to offer as applications of Orwell's ideas to contemporary politics and events.His literary reflections are the more successful ones. Two essays in particular -- "Not Too Good", a comparison of Orwell and Oscar Wilde; and "On Common Decency" -- are especially good. The former compares the differing ways in which both Orwell and Wilde rebelled against the notion that humans should strive toward perfection. Both found the notion appalling, but for very different reasons and they rebelled against it in very different ways. Wilde resisted Victorian morality head-on in sensuous, aesthetic resistance, while Orwell resisted the aspiration toward perfection on the grounds that it was inhuman.In "On Common Decency", Williams explores Orwell's efforts to articulate his vision of democratic socialism. Orwell's own socio-political aspirations for the world were expressed less in terms of complex and jingoistic political theory, and more in terms of simple folk concepts like 'decency'. Democratic socialism would never be won by imposing high theory on the average person, his work implies; but the essential ideas are already there, in the everyday notions of decency that so many common folk enact every day, and which the others -- the elites, the academics, the revolutionaries -- simply need to listen to.