The totalitarian horrors which Nineteen Eighty-Four exposes, from the denial of objective truth to mass surveillance, are alive and well in contemporary landscapes bossed by Trump and Putin

Previous Orwell biopics have tended to hire some well-known actor to impersonate the subject. It’s a process fraught with difficulty as there is hardly anything in the way of a template: no record of Orwell’s voice survives and his appearances on film are limited to 10 seconds of a Pathé Newsreel shot at the 1921 Eton Wall Game. If Ronald Pickup, who played him in John Glenister’s The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (1983), and Chris Langham, in Chris Durlacher’s George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (2003), made a reasonable fist of it, then they did so in the knowledge that there was no yardstick against which they could be compared.

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