George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were at opposite ends of a spectrum that met in a circle. Orwell, born Eric Blair, was an atheist and socialist champion of the proletariat while Waugh was a serious convert to Catholicism and hobnobbed with the British conservative aristocracy.

Yet at their core, they were astonishingly similar writers and thinkers, David Lebedoff concludes. The author of several previous books (including "Cleaning Up," about the Exxon Valdez case) offers here an intriguing comparison of their lives and comes up with a strong case for closely shared values.

		"THE SAME MAN: GEORGE ORWELL AND EVELYN WAUGH IN LOVE AND WAR" By David Lebedoff Random House ($26)

A few basic things they did have in common: Both were born in 1903 into, despite differences in family income, roughly the same social class and their early boyhoods were relatively pleasant.

Each, of course, became a world-renowned author whose works, decades after initial publication, sell in the hundreds of thousands a year.

But "Waugh was hard and funny and elegant," Lebedoff writes, "while Blair was soft and quiet and shabby." Boarding school gave Orwell his foundational understanding of the world as harsh, bullying, unequal and unfair.

Waugh, on the other hand, thrived at school. There his lifelong social-climbing began.

Whereas Orwell was bullied, Waugh was an enthusiastic bully. (This recalls Tom Wolfe's remark that bullies become conservatives, the bullied, liberals.)

Orwell was a deliberately impoverished stoic and materialist, interested primarily in this world and its politics, despising the empire and the class that ran it.

Waugh reveled in the wealth that his early novels brought him and eagerly sought the company of ruling elites. As for politics, his Roman Catholicism taught him that was a thing of this world and he had little interest in it.

Yet, with his second novel, "Vile Bodies" (1930), he wrote a book that was not just "funny," but funny with a bleak worldview that created a society that was as hopeless as the conclusion of Orwell's "1984."

The two men had been prescient about the prospect of war and sought active military service.

Both were devoted to their writing to the exclusion and detriment of their families and social lives. Each admired the other's writing tremendously. They met once, at Waugh's wish, shortly before Orwell's death in January 1950.

But more than all that, in the author's estimation, "they saw in modern life a terrible enemy." Orwell was the nicer human being; for all his intense religious faith, Waugh remained shockingly cruel and bad-mannered. But both were committed to moral principles, one connected to the next world, one to this.

Theirs was a fight against not only the totalitarianism that loomed in their own time, but also against the future, which they feared would strip humans of their humanity.

In Waugh's many novels and in Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984" and perhaps most of all in his matchless essays ("treasures of our culture"), Lebedoff believes, these two giants of 20th-century British literature warned us of what was to come and "came to be, improbably enough, the same man."