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A writer ceases to be iconoclastic and becomes iconic when he is subsumed into the fabric of the society that he criticises. In the case of George Orwell, his most powerful work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is cited not only by radical leftists and reformist liberals (his natural allies), but nostalgically and romantically by a Tory prime minister attempting to evoke an England secure in its traditional values and ironically by populist, raucously postmodern television shows such as Big Brother and Room 101.

Born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, Orwell was educated at Eton before joining the Indian Imperial Police, serving in Burma, where he conceived a profound distaste for imperialism. On his return to England in 1927, and in Paris in 1929, he took menial jobs to support his ambition to become a writer. From these experiences came his first novels and essays about the condition of the working class and the development of his personal political conscience.

In 1936, Orwell fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Out of this came, crucially, his strong antipathy to Stalinism and the enduring belief in Democratic Socialism that inspired Animal Farm (1945), a political fable (“all men are equal but some are more equal than others”) based on post-tsarist Russia. This was followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, a powerful, disturbingly prescient allegorical novel that denounced Stalinist totalitarianism and has become the standard modern reference for opposition to statist control and oppression.

Shortly after it was published, Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950. Without him we would understand ourselves less and be less brave against tyrannies.

One to read: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

More about George Orwell

Read his obituary, printed in the Times on January 23, 1950

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