Orwell: A Man of Our Time
RICHARD BRADFORD
(BLOOMSBURY, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

For years, the standard line on Nineteen Eighty-Four was that George Orwell insisted on a fully spelt-out ­version of the title rather than the numerals because it was not his intention to predict how the world might look and function in that year. Orwell was simply describing the world as he saw it in 1948 (under the original title The Last Man in Europe) but had then simply flipped the digits.

It turns out that Orwell was a very good predictor indeed, not just in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but throughout his doggedly paradoxical career. It’s not an easy time to be writing in praise of him. Critics and political figures have been flipping their digits (in the other sense) at Orwell’s reputation for years. He has been dismissed as an old Etonian slummer, a defender of the Raj, an anti-Semite, a sexist, a class traitor, a hapless adventurer, a provocative denier of the very medium (fiction) that made him famous. And he spent too much energy biting the various other hands that fed him.

Nevertheless, “Orwellian” has entered the language in a far more meaningful way than “Kafkaesque” has. Orwell gave us Newspeak, doublethink, a world of endless war and ­universal surveillance. He gave us two brilliant game-show ideas in Big Brother and Room 101. Has any bright spark ever asked Frank Skinner to abolish rats? Does any one ever watch the grim fumblings and couplings of Big Brother and think of Winston and Julia trying to find love in a loveless world?