George Orwell coined every one of these now-familiar terms from scratch in 1949: the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother, even 1984 itself. They have long since escaped the pages of fiction to shape how we think and talk about freedom and its suppression, born originally from Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world under absolute totalitarian control. Continuously in print since it first appeared, the novel still draws readers into that dark, fully realised world through characters as ordinary as ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose falling in love becomes, in itself, an act of rebellion against the Party. Ranged against them is the full weight of the state, watching its citizens through surveillance technology that now feels all too familiar; the past is rewritten at will, so that no truth survives except the most recent version, and Big Brother, simultaneously loved and feared, oversees everything. Even keeping a private diary, as Winston does, carries the penalty of death. As Winston fights to hold on to his own freedom of thought, his most formidable adversary is O’Brien, who uses fear and pain to work his way into Winston’s mind — does 2+2 make 4, or 5? The answer is found in Room 101. Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell’s final novel, but the world it conjures has never really left us, offering each new generation of readers both a mirror for their own times and a warning for what may come. This edition also includes the following selection of Orwell’s essays, column extracts and broadcasts: A Hanging; Spilling the Spanish Beans; Reviews of Jack London, The Iron Heel; H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Awakes; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ernest Bramah, The Secret of the League ; England Your England; Looking Back on the Spanish War; Arthur Koestler; The Prevention of Literature; Politics and the English Language; Why I Write; Politics Vs Literature; Sir Walter Raleigh; The Three Super-States of the Future; Persecution of Writers in USSR; Literature and Totalitarianism; Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift
ISBN 13: 9781840228021
Author: George Orwell
