Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people’s first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother’s omnipresent, unitary police state is not a reality we live with in the West), it makes fascinating reading.

Some of Orwell’s inventions from 1984 entered the English language, like ‘Thought Police,’ ‘Big Brother’ ‘Newspeak’ and of course, the general concept of an ‘Orwellian’ society or future.

Recommendations from our site

“In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor,

“Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China.” Read more...

The best books on Dystopia and Utopia

Chan Koonchung, Novelist

“It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous.” Read more...

The best books on Political Satire

P J O’Rourke, Political Commentator

“None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?” Read more...

The best books on The US Intelligence Services

Tim Weiner, Journalist

“It alerts us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals.” Read more...

The best books on Torture

Juan Mendez, Lawyer

“Orwellian has come to mean the kind of surveillance state we live in today, with all the CCTV. It’s not a prophetic book but it’s a warning.” Read more...

The best books on Global Security

Chris Abbott, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist

“It was originally titled 1948, but the publisher said to him that was too close. They had to push it back, so he just changed it around to 1984.” Read more...

The best books on Human Imperfection

Henry Normal, Poet

“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient.” Read more...

Books that Changed the World

Amanda Craig, Journalist

“The book looks at how order and disorder co-habit. Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, understood it from the outside brilliantly.” Read more...

The best books on Totalitarian Russia

Robert Service, Historian