Latest news with #NineteenEighty-Four
Irish Independent
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Colin Murphy: Utopia or apocalypse? How our AI future is being shaped by the real influencers of this world
The best dystopian fiction has normally been set decades into the future. George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1940s. Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late 1960s. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is set in 2019 — he released it in 1982.
Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Anna Funder: 'Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic'
How does your experience as an international human rights lawyer help you as an author? What skills did you pick up in your previous career and continue to rely on? I was a lawyer briefly and a bad one. I was very young when I stopped. What has stayed with me is the training in trying to identify the very heart of an issue so that you can ask the right questions. I have also retained a sense of what lawyers call natural justice, which means that you have to consider the opposing view, almost with as much energy, to make sure that you are being fair. This approach has been very important to me in all my work. Lawyers are also trained to dig dirt on people, which is what you do very well with your book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life. How was that experience for you? (laughs) Digging dirt on author George Orwell was not my aim but I was very shocked at what I found. Well, I think that he was a repressed homosexual. There is a lot of evidence for that. He co-wrote the novella Animal Farm with his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. It was her idea to write that book, and her voice is very much in it. And it looks like she saved Orwell's life during the Spanish Civil War. I also didn't know that he was so enormously unfaithful to Eileen. Besides all this, he was sort of irresponsible in other ways. He almost had his nieces and nephews killed in a boating accident, which was very preventable. He was a bit reckless with his own life and with others' lives as well. These discoveries about his life were unexpected. Your approach to his life seems like that of an archaeologist or a detective. Please tell us about your research. With the sort of legal mind that I have, I really try to get all the facts right. That's why this book has a huge number of endnotes to tie in everything to fact. That said, I want the reading experience to be seamless. I want people to inhale this book. I want it to be so exciting that you just keep going. Research helps. I went to Spain where Orwell and Eileen lived during the Spanish Civil War. I paid a visit to the trenches in Aragon, and I walked around Barcelona. Orwell was fighting in the war, and Eileen was working for a Marxist political party. I also went to a remote island called Jura off the coast of Scotland and spent some time in the house where Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. I went into the bedroom where he lay as a very ill man recovering from tuberculosis and typed out his book. It was so moving to be there! In addition, I went to some archives in London for primary research. I also read six major biographies of Orwell quite closely. The accounts of his life vary across books. I was keen to examine how his life has been written up and how Eileen has been written out of it. What makes Eileen an attractive personality for you? Well, everybody loved her and I think I know the reason why. One of her friends was a novelist and wrote her into a character in a novel. Eileen had an ability to listen deeply. She made people feel seen and heard. She had the generosity of spirit to really think about something from someone else's point of view. She could sense how they were feeling. If you could plan a girls' day out with Eileen, where would you take her? I live in Sydney, so I would take Eileen for a long walk along the cliff tops and the beach. We'd look across the ocean at the lighthouse and just talk and talk and talk. I would ask her a lot of questions. I want to know how much she loved Orwell, though one can never quantify love, or how much he and his work were a way for her to write before she found the confidence to write on her own. She was the one who took up jobs to support them financially. She worked in the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information in London during the Second World War. And later she worked at the Ministry of Food. The ministries that Orwell writes about in Nineteen Eighty-Four were informed by her work. Eileen was fabulous! Was Eileen bitter about Orwell taking credit for her work, or would you call her a doormat? No, Eileen was in no way a doormat. But I don't think that she was bitter either. She was extremely intelligent. Once, she said that Orwell had 'a remarkable political simplicity' whereas she was a very sophisticated political thinker. One of the biographers quoted her as saying that he had 'a remarkable political sympathy'. My research showed me how biographers changed the words because they could not bear their hero, Orwell, to have a wife who was cleverer. I think Eileen was happy that she was improving his work. Of course, she was pleased with Animal Farm. It is really an almost perfect novel. Orwell and Eileen wrote it together. Your book completely changes the way fans look at Orwell's life and work. What are your thoughts on recent allegations of sexual assault against author Neil Gaiman, and how they are changing the way fans approach his work? This issue applies to a lot of male figures throughout history because patriarchy allows men to have a public reputation that is decent, and then do things in private to women and sometimes children. The crimes that they commit are edited out of the story. Shame works to silence women and children who are victims of sexual abuse. We are seeing this with Neil Gaiman now but we have seen this with Woody Allen too. People don't seem to care about it. Things get complicated when you are talking about an artist because artists are often looking at things right out on the edge of what it is to be human. We want works of art to frighten us or to reveal things that we are refusing to see. They go to the edge of what is acceptable. They write out of their flaws at times. Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic. You see all these aspects represented in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. People don't seem to mind them. I haven't read Neil Gaiman before and I don't plan to read him now. I hope there is justice for the women involved because terrible things seem to have happened. But my 15-year-old son is reading his book at the moment and I am not telling him about the allegations that have come out. He is 15, and I just want him to have this experience of reading the book without knowing all of that. Personally, what I know about Orwell doesn't bother me. I am happy to read his work. I am not less fond of him. I see him as a much more complex man. The superhero version of Orwell is fictitious, and someone who was so vanilla could never have written those books. You stand on the shoulders of several feminist historians and activists. Please talk about those who have influenced your work. The work of Adrienne Rich, the American poet and essayist, has been very important to me. She was an extraordinary thinker about women and men, and sexuality. Her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence is among my favourites. She had a beautiful way with language because she was a poet, a fearless person, and unbelievably smart. Resistance is a theme that runs across your books. All That I Am revolves around people who resist the Nazis. In Stasiland, you write about people who resist the secret police in East Germany. Wifedom is about Eileen who resisted patriarchy in her own quiet and dignified way. What makes you return to this theme in every book? This is a very deep psychological question. How much time do you have? (laughs) Firstly, because I'm interested in human courage and human conscience, and those things are to be seen most clearly in extreme situations where they are called into being. We need to think about resistance today because we live in a surveillance society of the kind that the Stasi could only have dreamt of. Despite the risks, people are resisting today. They are questioning, for instance, what Donald Trump is doing. Stories of resistance are appealing to me as a novelist because they are about what it means to be human, to be brave, to take action and be a hero. I grew up in an upper-middle class left-wing household. As a child, I was very aware that a lot of power was being exercised over me. I grew up observing my parents as powerful intellectual giants running the regime, if you want to call it, of the family. That was a deeply formative experience for me. There was a lot of argument around the dinner table. It was ostensibly intellectual but it also had a lot of emotional force. As a writer you are always looking at what's really going on under the surface. My childhood was my training in looking at powerful people, hearing what they were saying and then sensing what was going on at an emotional level. Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
Indian Express
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
When the clocks strike thirteen: Why George Orwell's opening line sets alarm bells ringing
'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) A world where clocks strike 'thirteen', might as well be one where pigs fly. Such is the beauty of the opening line of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that one might be almost forgiven for missing the blatant contradictions laid out right under one's nose, cleverly wrapped in mundane scene-setting banality. In one fell swoop, Orwell tells us that this is a malfunctioning world where the normal rules do not apply – all clocks simultaneously strike an impossible chime and the day is bizarrely both bright and cold. Decoding the impossible chime Suspending disbelief, many readers might conclude the author meant, 1 pm or 1300 hours military time. However, they would be anachronistically mistaken. Back in 1949, when the novel was first published, the world still ran on analogue time. Striking clocks, those time-honoured mechanisms that chimed the hours, were designed only to count to 12. A thirteenth strike was impossible. Orwell knew this. And that impossibility is precisely the point. Clocks do not strike thirteen, and if one does, it is either broken, or lying, and if all clocks strike thirteen then it is clearly a world where lies are accepted and enforced. Had Orwell meant to denote afternoon, he would have written '13:00' or 'one in the afternoon.' Instead, he chose a phrase loaded with acoustic dread: 'the clocks were striking thirteen.' In choosing the language of mechanical chimes, Orwell signals something off-key. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four runs on a different schedule, ringing with a falseness that is heard loud and clear. By declaring an impossibility as reality, Orwell introduces the reader to doublethink, his term for the mental discipline of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both as true. To accept that a clock can strike thirteen—without protest, without questioning—is the novel's first test. Pass it, and you are already a citizen of Oceania. Perhaps most chilling is Orwell's use of collective certainty. The clocks, plural, strike thirteen. Not a single broken mechanism, but an entire system conspiring to mislead. This is not a glitch in the matrix. This is the matrix. It is, as Orwell might say, not that the lie is believed, but that believing the lie is required. Orwell did not coin the phrase. In fact, a century before Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Thomas Hardy wrote in Far From the Madding Crowd: 'This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.' Hardy's metaphor captured how a single falsehood can unravel an entire reality. Orwell takes this idea and weaponises it. In Oceania, the clocks don't just accidentally strike thirteen, they do so as a matter of policy. Incidentally, British legal tradition includes the fictional case Rex v Haddock, in which a testimony is compared to the thirteenth stroke of the clock, which is not only false in itself, but casts doubt on all that came before it. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the clocks striking thirteen don't just suggest a malfunction they announce a regime where malfunction is mandated. Truth, like time, has been reengineered. The image also appears in Philippa Pearce's beloved children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden, where the grandfather clock striking thirteen becomes a literal gateway to another time. 'Tom Long is sent to stay with his uncle and aunt in a flat without a garden. But at night he wakes to hear the grandfather clock striking 13 – and finds that the small yard behind the flat is a big sunlit garden.' Here, the thirteenth strike is as unnatural as it is in Orwell's world. It becomes a fracture in time that allows Tom to step into the past. The imagery underscores the same fundamental truth: when the clock strikes thirteen, the ordinary rules no longer apply. Still ticking In the 75 years since 1984 was published, Orwell's opening line has lost none of its shock value. When we say 'Orwellian' today, we mean the normalisation of the absurd, which is essentially the opening line's essence. As modern societies grapple with disinformation, surveillance, and the bending of facts to fit ideology, the chime of the thirteenth hour ticks closer. ('Drawing a Line' is an eight-column weekly series exploring the stories behind literature's most iconic opening lines. Each column offers interpretation, not definitive analysis—because great lines, like great books, invite many readings.) Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at or You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More
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Scotsman
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
George Orwell's home 'of hope' on isolated Scottish island where he wrote 1984 revisited
Photographer Craig Easton travelled to 'An Extremely Un-get-atable Place' to immerse himself in George Orwell's former home. Sign up to our History and Heritage newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... In George Orwell's search for isolation from a troubled world on a Scottish island and the pursuit of pleasure in simple things, photographer Craig Easton has followed. Now, a new book that reimagines Orwell's time at Barnhill on the Isle of Jura, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final novel and cautionary tale of totalitarianism, is now due. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Barnhill on the Isle of Jura, where author George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, photographed by Craig Easton | Craig Easton Mr Easton travelled to Barnhill where Orwell completed the novel in his first-floor bedroom dense with black tobacco smoke and paraffin fumes. The writer went there in 1946, recently widowed and looking for freedom from post-war London, a place to recover from tuberculosis and ultimately, Easton believes, a place of hope. Mr Easton said: 'Orwell's work across the board is so resonant with the times we are living in now, it kind of drew me to say 'I need to go there now'. 'It is misconception really that people think of Orwell as this guy who was dying and angst ridden and went to this isolated place to write a dystopian book. That is just not the case, it doesn't ring true to me at all. 'The reason he went there was he wanted to warn the world about what he saw coming, but he went there with a sense of hope . He went there with his young son to start a life, to grow a garden, all those things. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'For me, going to Barnhill was an opportunity to focus on the small things in life and focus on hope rather than the dystopian world we seem to live in.' George Orwell arrived on Jura in 1946 following the death of his wife, Eileen, with his adopted son and sister. It was there he wrote his last novel, 1984. | CC Orwell wrote of the 'eight-miles of inconceivable road' that led to the farmhouse where he made a home with his young son, Richard, and sister Avril. Mr Easton travelled with a cumbersome 1952 wooden plate camera and a tonne-like rucksack of equipment to the house that Orwell described as being "in an extremely un-get-atable place' - a description now borrowed for the title of Easton's book following his journey there in a damp and cold spell in February and March. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad With no company - apart from a meal with a neighbour around a mile away one night- and time and space unfolding in that unique island way, Mr Easton found he could fall into the process of 'making pictures for the pure pleasure of making pictures'. The way light fell on a wall or a chip in a teapot became his concerns. 'The reason he went there was he wanted to warn the world about what he saw coming, but he went there with a sense of hope,' Easton said. 'He went there with his young son to start a life, to grow a garden, all those things. 'For me, going to Barnhill was an opportunity to focus on the small things in life and focus on hope rather than the dystopian world we seem to live in.' READ MORE: Fresh dispatch from abandoned Scottish island that has intrigued photographers for more than 100 years Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Photographer Craig Easton worked with a 1952 wooden plate camera to capture Barnhill and its surrounds. PIC: Craig Easton. | Craig Easton Tea was used in the developing process by Mr Easton for some of the photos taken at Barnhill in tribute to Orwell's love for the drink, which the writer described as 'one of the mainstays of civiliaztions in this country' in an essay published in 1946. Mr Easton, who was named Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2021, said a sense of presence of Orwell remained at Barnhill. READ MORE: Eerie new photos of an abandoned Scottish island He said: 'I am not a great believer in auras or things like that, but the sense of his life there was very clear to me. The house is pretty much unchanged from when he lived there in the 1940s. 'It is not an easy place to live. It was very very damp and cold in February. I was very ill when I came back. I think I had properly exhausted myself carrying all my equipment about. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It didn't seem like the kind of place you would go to choose to recover from TB, but Orwell saw it better than London and the smog of London.' Barnhill has changed little since Orwell's time there with photographer finding a "clear sense" of the author's life in the farmhouse. PIC: Craig Easton. | Craig Easton Orwell arrived at Barnhill the year after his wife, Eileen, died from a hysterectomy aged 39. The couple had spoken about relocating there, with Eilieen in touch with the owners, the Fletchers, who still own the house, about the property. Her son, Richard, was adopted by Orwell and has written a foreword for Mr Easton's book as patron of the Orwell Society. He has recalled the sound of the typewriter echoing through the house, their shared lunches at Barnhill and the afternoon the pair nearly drowned after their boat was sucked into the notorious Corryvreckan tidal whirlpool on the way home from an afternoon of fishing, one of Orwell's favourite pastimes. Photographer Craig Easton | Contributed Mr Easton, in his own work at Barnhill, has reflected on one of Orwell's essays, Some Thoughts on a Common Toad, written in 1946, which reflects on the power of nature's joy in the face of political disenchantment. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Orwell wrote: 'Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost?
Observer
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Observer
Orwell's 1984 and the madness of the West
This article is a plea from a Brit to his Omani brothers and sisters, especially younger Omanis: never look to the West as your model. Don't be dazzled by their technology or their slogans. Remember that a society without truth and compassion — no matter how wealthy — is a broken society. And never forget how blessed you are to live in your beloved Oman. As a teenager I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's powerful novel written in 1949. It's a dystopian vision of the future and a stark warning of what could come. Sadly, Orwell wasn't just imagining a far-off nightmare — he was describing what we now see unfolding across the so-called 'civilised' West. He described a world where people are trained not just to accept lies, but to believe them. In Orwell's novel, Winston Smith is forced to say and believe he sees five fingers when there are only four — and eventually, under torture, he does. This is exactly what has happened to many Westerners. Their eyes are open, but their hearts and minds are blind. They see a rise in mental illness, depression and suicide. They read about exploding rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. They witness the rise in violent crime, the silent suffering of elderly parents abandoned in uncaring Care Homes. They see cities filled with homeless, broken souls. And yet they rarely ask why. They think it's normal. Chaos has become routine. In the UK knife crime dominates the headlines. Teenagers stab each other in the street. But the public no longer reacts. It's just part of life in a 'modern democracy'. And then there's Gaza. The UK government funded the bombs that killed Palestinian children, defended the Zionist occupiers at the UN, and criminalised protest at home. And yet they still tell themselves, 'We are the good guys.' This is Orwell's world. A complete reversal of morality. 1984 warned us of a time when truth would be destroyed, language twisted and people pacified with distractions, fear and propaganda. That time has come. Too many Western societies, despite their wealth, are rotting from within. They are ruled by greed and delusion — not wisdom. And instead of fighting back the majority embrace the madness. Why are they sick? Why are their children lost? In Orwell's world, silence was enforced by the State. In today's West, silence is chosen. Most people don't want to see the truth. Just like the brainwashed citizens of 1984 they look at injustice, suffering and madness and say, 'This is fine because we have democracy.' But it's not fine. And tragically, they no longer know the difference between a healthy society and a broken one. The real danger? That the rest of the world follows them blindly — right into disaster. Will we wake up before the West drags us into another war, perhaps even nuclear war, that could destroy all of mankind? I take no pleasure in writing this. I am British. I was once proud of that. But the Britain I loved no longer exists.
