08 Jul George Orwell

It’s seventy years since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell’s ominously prophetic masterwork. As an allegory for our present stressful times, it’s amazingly insightful. Some of the book’s most frightening notions are even with us in reality: Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, for example, foreshadows the now-routine misuse of language for nefarious political purposes. As Martin Jennings, the creator of the Orwell statue, has said about Orwell: “He illuminates the path for those who seek clarity, decency and honesty in public discourse.”

On your next literary tour of England you should stop by New Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC, in central London. (Orwell worked – rather unhappily – for the BBC for two years during the Second World War.) Jennings’ splendid statue stands in front and inscribed in the wall alongside are these cautionary words from Orwell’s proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945): “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”