- 1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four] (fadedpage.com)
Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government’s invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrime”
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) (findoes.etoncollege.com)
Huxley taught very briefly at Eton during the war: Eric Blair (George Orwell) and Harold Acton were among his pupils during that period.
- Early on the morning of 21 January [1949], an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs, killing him at the age of 46.
- Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India into what he described as a “lower-upper-middle class” family.
- George Orwell (Wikipedia)
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-FourTo see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George OrwellWar against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
George Orwell