Else what's a heaven for?

My Orwell fandom didn't last long. I was excited to pick up All Art is Propaganda, thinking it would be essay after essay of his writing and his brilliance. The first essay was 3 chapters on Dickens, which was fine because he rationalized my dislike of Dickens, arguing against the common view of him as a social reformer in that he wrote about a very narrow band of commoner, he doesn't write about actual change (either in social conditions or in his characters), and the only way he sees change happening is through the benevolence of the government or the people who run the country. Which was an interesting perspective. Then I read an essay about pulp magazines aimed at young men that don't exist anymore, probably the forerunner of comic books.¹ Again, he had interesting insights into who actually read them and why. He has a conspiracy theorist take on them, arguing they are released by Big Publishing to keep lower class men thinking the right way, which is to say, docile and happy to serve their betters. The next essays were reviews of long ago, not very important theater productions and I realized that I'd never read the entire book, so I started skipping around. I've never seen The Great Dictator, so it was interesting to hear his views on that movie, and it's fun reading such a well-regarded and skilled (dare I say snarky?) writer dump on Dali (he was a total freak, says a former board member of the Lesbian Sex Mafia), Kipling, Swift, and Tolstoy. OTOH, zomg, not everything is about class warfare. It was reasonable, in describing his experiences in the Spanish Civil War to talk about socialism vs communism vs fascism, but there's only so much of that I can take. *sighs* I'm not even going to dig up the other book of his essays, because if the critical essays are this full of class warfare, I can't imagine how much there'll be in his narrative essays.

The Amazon reviewers went crazy over all of Roger Ebert's essay collections, so I bought The Great Movies when it was a Kindle deal. It is very good: he is insightful and has such interesting things to say, I want to go back and watch movies I hated because he points things out I never noticed. OTOH, there's an awful lot of dead babies in great movies. I may someday get around to re-reading and finishing the book, maybe when our home is set up for movie watching.

At this point, I went looking on the Internet for lists of great essayists and really didn't find anyone who sounded like a great writer, with great insights, preferably a snarky one. I did come across a tome called The Best American Essays of the Century. I suspect Joyce Carol Oates and I diverge in our views of what constitutes a great essay. The second one I read was about suicide and after reading a few more, I decided not to torture myself by reading the whole thing.

So... who's a good writer with keen insight?
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¹What do young men read these days, to pass the time? Compared to comic books and pulp magazines, maybe Warrior Cats and Hunger Games aren't so bad.