Buy new:
-44% $13.99$13.99
Delivery Friday, August 16
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Save with Used - Good
$10.99$10.99
Delivery Thursday, August 22
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: saveherenow
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Nineteen Eighty-Four Hardcover – November 3, 1992
Purchase options and add-ons
Winston Smith spends his days rewriting history to fit the narrative that his government wants citizens to believe. But as the gap between the propaganda he writes and the reality he lives proves too much for Winston to swallow, he begins to seek some form of escape. His desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, tyrannical state illuminates the tendencies apparent in every modern society, and makes vivid the universal predicament of the individual.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure900L
- Dimensions5.24 x 1.03 x 8.29 inches
- PublisherEveryman's Library
- Publication dateNovember 3, 1992
- ISBN-100679417397
- ISBN-13978-0679417392
Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book…Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly.” –The New Yorker
“A book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin…Such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing, and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.” –V. S. Pritchett
“Orwell’ s novel escorts us so quietly, so directly, and so dramatically from our own day to the fate which may be ours in the future, that the experience is a blood-chilling one.” –Saturday Review
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
George Orwell's life as a writer falls distinctly into two parts, and it happens that he himself dated the change precisely. On 20 August 1939, the night before Stalin's Soviet Union signed a pact of friendship with Hitler's Germany, Orwell dreamed that the war expected by all adults of his generation had begun, and realized that 'I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible.' His dream anticipated the reality of war by no more than a couple of weeks, and although Orwell's health made it impossible for him to enter the armed forces, he supported the aims of the war and was opposed to a negotiated peace.
The decision was a contradiction of much he had said and written up to that time. Only a couple of months earlier he had expressed the view that the British and French so-called democracies were 'in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting cheap labour', and had said the only hope of saving Britain from either foreign or home-grown Fascist rule was the emergence of a mass party whose first pledges would be 'to refuse war and to right imperial injustice'. In a letter that must have alarmed the art critic and peaceful anarchist Herbert Read who received it, he suggested that those who were both anti-war and anti-Fascist should buy and secrete printing presses in what he called 'some discreet place' so that they would be ready for the issue ofrevolutionary pamphlets when the time came.
So Orwell was inconsistent: but then his life up to that night in August 1939 had been a pattern of changes in attitude marking changed beliefs. He was born in Bengal in 1903 as Eric Arthur Blair, the only male child (he had an older and younger sister) of a civil servant in the Opium Department of the Indian government. Like many children of what he later called the 'lower-upper-middle class' he was sent as a boarder to a preparatory school, named St Cyprian's, where by an autobiographical account written not long before his death he was very unhappy. The scholarship that took him to Eton did not change his belief that the prime necessities for success in life were 'money, athleticism, tailor-made clothes and a charming smile', and that he possessed none of these attributes, being weak, ugly, unpopular and cowardly. That was not the view of Eton contemporaries like Cyril Connolly, who saw Orwell not as an outcast but a rebel. Yet the teenage rebel retained respect for the standards engendered by St Cyprian's and Eton, and a feeling that may be called sentimental or patriotic for the British Empire. He served five years in Burma with the Imperial Police, and did so by choice and not compulsion, although he said later that 'I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness that I cannot make clear.'
There is no doubt that he ended by hating it, and he was not a man who did things by halves. After turning away from the Imperialist ideal he tried without much success to involve himself with the poorest and most wretched groups in society. 'At that time failure seemed to me the only virtue', and in pursuit of failure he spent some weeks with hop-pickers, lived briefly with tramps, and tried to get himself put in prison as a drunk. He lived for eighteen months in Paris, writing without much commercial success, and the record of that time, Down and Out in Paris and London was his first published book. He was not proud of or very pleased with the result, and decided to use a pseudonym rather than his given name. He suggested four possibilities to the publisher Victor Gollancz, saying 'I rather favour George Orwell.' Gollancz favoured it too, and early in 1933 the name George Orwell came into existence via a book jacket. Thereafter, while early friends continued to call him Eric, later ones like me knew him only as George.
Orwell's career after Down and Out and in the years before the war shows the uncertainties, confusions, fresh starts and false starts almost inescapable for anybody who became seriously involved in Left-wing politics during that very political decade. In that time he published four novels which had reasonable sales and reviews but no outstanding success, and The Road to Wigan Pier. The first part of this commissioned book, which dealt with the hard life of miners, was much approved by the Left intelligentsia, but the second caused shock waves of disapproval for its attack on what Orwell called 'the dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers' who were magnetically drawn to Socialism and the magical word progress 'like bluebottles to a dead cat'.
The Spanish Civil War took him to Spain to fight for the Republic, and his experience there was the basis of his finest work during the decade. Homage to Catalonia appeared in 1938 in an edition of only 1 ,500 copies, 600 of them still unsold when he died in 1950. The story of his life during the thirties might be called 'the education of a Socialist', from the first blundering attempts to understand the poor by living with or like them, through a high-minded period of linking himself with a political party (in Orwell's case the splinter group the Independent Labour Party), into the full understanding of the noble idealism and bitter internecine hatreds within groups that called themselves Socialist, as they were demonstrated to him during his months in Spain. In 1947 he said:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it ... Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably when I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
It is no wonder that at the time he regarded the Spanish experience as a turning point in his attitude towards society, yet there was one more lesson still to learn. He emerged from Spain an apparent revolutionary, as we have seen in the call for a mass anti-war party and preparation for guerrilla warfare. Yet such a thesis went against the deepest impulses of his nature, the love of his country, its people, customs and landscape, that was the emotional basis of his personality. An understanding of this prompted the final realization of what Eric Blair/George Orwell truly believed: that it was necessary for the war to be fought, with Socialism the end to be achieved when it had been won. By the side of that went the obligation to expose the deceits and villainous practices of Communist parties, as he had seen them in Spain and imagined them in the Soviet Union. He did not stray from those purposes in the last decade of his life.
*
Because George Orwell is now so famous, with all the books consistently appearing in new editions, and the adjective Orwellian stamped on the mind of every politician and leaderwriter for use once a week, it is well to be reminded of the way in which he was regarded during most of his life. Had he died in 1939 (something quite possible, for his health was never good) he would be remembered now as a maverick with some lively but highly eccentric opinions that need not be considered seriously. And if his life had been cut off before his last decade that would not have been an unreasonable view, for the achievements up to then had been minor. The account of life as a plongeur in Down and Out, the description of going down a mine in Wigan Pier and much of Homage To Catalonia have the extraordinary directness of his finest writing, but there are elements in the first two books that leave a sense of the writer being selective, not telling us all the facts of the case.
We know now that this was so, that he could have escaped from the squalor of the down and out life earlier than he did, and that some details of his Wigan experiences were not exactly reported. A passage in The Road to Wigan Pier describes how, from the train that took him away from the town, he saw a girl kneeling on the stones in the backyard of a little slum house. She was pushing a stick up a blocked waste pipe, and her face wore 'the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen'. The image is a powerful one, the actual incident described in Orwell's diary much less so. In fact he saw the girl walking up a squalid alley, she was not clearing a blocked pipe and he was not in a train. Perhaps this only matters if we are looking for the literal accuracy expected of (but rarely found in) newspaper reporting. There can be no doubt that in these books, and to a lesser extent in Homage To Catalonia, Orwell is presenting reality heightened for emotional effect. Something similar can be said of much writing based on things seen, and later set down for literary effect.
The fiction of the thirties reveals his limitations as a novelist, in particular an inability to imagine characters outside his own direct experience. Burmese Days is primarily interesting in the light of the author's reactions to the country, and Keep The Aspidistra Flying as an echo of Orwell's own hard times, with the other characters not much more than shadows. This book may have been influenced by Gissing, whose portraits of Victorian lower-class London Orwell greatly admired, as A Clergyman's Daughter was influenced - and damaged - by his reading of Ulysses. The novels as a whole produce their undoubtedly powerful effect through the intensity with which the writer communicates his feelings about Imperial Burma and depression Britain, but in terms of character and incident they are not successful books. When Coming Up For Air was reprinted in 1947 he sent me a copy. I suggested that a good many of the opinions and thoughts and feelings attributed to George Bowling were really those of George Orwell, and he replied:
Of course you are perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway ... One difficulty I have never solved is that one has masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about, e g. the part about fishing in that-book, and no way of using them up except by disguising them as a novel.
I am not a real novelist anyway: it was through acceptance of this fact that Orwell came to realize the nature of his genius, and to fulfil it in the two great moral fables, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Product details
- Publisher : Everyman's Library; First Edition (November 3, 1992)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679417397
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679417392
- Reading age : 16+ years, from customers
- Lexile measure : 900L
- Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.24 x 1.03 x 8.29 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #41,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #794 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- #1,670 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #4,038 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.
At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.
Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

The only place you will need for any book you want.

Author shows rich interest in Political Philosophers and their Philosophies. Book "Political Philosophers and Philosophies" is his first short E-Book available on Amazon Kindle.
He has written Political Science optional book in both English and Hindi medium.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the historical context interesting, prescient, and believable. They also describe the realism as beautiful, relatable, and realistic. Readers find the message insightful, creative, and the erosion of individual freedoms. Opinions are mixed on the characterization, writing quality, and content. Some find the main character relatable and likable, while others find them bland. Reader opinions are mixed also on the emotional tone, with some finding it strengthening the plot and shocking, while other find it depressing and freaky.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the message insightful, interesting, and engrossing. They also say the ideas are mind-blowing and relevant to current times. Readers also say it's a controversial book that grabs their attention. They say it sheds important light on the nature of power and the ability of the government.
"...thing that struck me was that the female character Julia, is an interesting addition...." Read more
"...I recommend “1984”, because it is a controversial book that grabs the reader’s attention as it reflects on government manipulation and social class..." Read more
"...This is the most useful insight in his book, delivered by the Grand Inquisitor O’Brien:“The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake...." Read more
"...by Orwell's ability to be more compelling, entertaining and engrossing than authors with the benefit of light sabers, phasers and teleportation...." Read more
Customers find the book beautiful, real, and descriptive. They also mention that the concerns from the past are well portrayed.
"...protagonist and his struggle amid this world turned upside down, is relatable and believable...." Read more
"...who has been assigned this book, know that you are reading a literary work of art...." Read more
"...Mine arrived with no damage at all and looks perfect." Read more
"It’s such a beautiful book, although it wasn’t really packaged how a book should. The box were too big, so the book came with damaged corners...." Read more
Customers find the historical context of the book interesting, revolutionary, and prescient. They also say it's as relevant today as it was when it was written and very timely to current times. Customers also mention that the book starts off great, but the author has a tendency to ramble.
"...1984 is an amazing book. If you enjoy thinking about something for a while and having your mind blown once every few pages, read this book now...." Read more
"...I highly recommend this book because in addition to being great fiction, it is also an analogy about our life...." Read more
"...1984 never loses its edge whatever the political climate, and never fails to make me think, and look at the world from another angle...." Read more
"...Am I happy I read 1984? Sure, it's a good piece of fiction, but will I refer to it or read it again? Nah!" Read more
Customers are mixed about the emotional tone. Some mention that it strengthens the plot, is a stunningly brilliant work of dystopian fiction, and creates an exhilaration. They also describe it as emotional and experiential. However, others say that the official language is very unsettling, depressing, and gives no blessing to the mind.
"...For me, this book was rough. The tone was bleak. Throughout. Unflinchingly somber and hopeless...." Read more
"...It gets a little freaky, but it was alright. 👍..." Read more
"...Plot is intricate and perfectly constructed to create a dystopian world that seems plausible in every respect...." Read more
"...But the novel itself, with its vivid prose and ferocious probity creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some find the writing detailed, structured, and concise, with fascinating words worth looking up. Others say that the book gets convoluted and the typesetting is strange.
"...There are so many elements here that have such deep and broad depth that will keep this work of literature relevant for many more years...." Read more
"...of the pages and the book kept going after the ending so it made it a confusing read." Read more
"...The writing is unequaled, the characters’ many layers are slowly revealed and the reader will find themselves soon learning that they have misjudged..." Read more
"...In fact, it is a somewhat difficult read - particularly the last 1/3 or so as the walls close in on the protagonist - Winston Smith...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the content. Some find it a stark warning to society, thought-provoking, and a lesson on how propaganda works. They also say it perfectly captures the western political phobias and idealogies of World War II. However, others find it boring, dishonest, stupid, and nonsensical.
"...This book is a lesson on how propaganda works—and how not to be susceptible to it...." Read more
"...they were whole truths, thus making what is actually a defective argument appear to be good...." Read more
"...dystopian world you enter when you open the book, but a beautifully brutal warning that, even as you read it, is prophetically coming true around..." Read more
"...NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, on the other hand, is so grimy that you almost want to wash your hands after reading it...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the characterization in the book. Some find the main character relatable and talented, while others say that the characters are bland and sad.
"...The writing is unequaled, the characters’ many layers are slowly revealed and the reader will find themselves soon learning that they have misjudged..." Read more
"This book is okay. The characters have no souls (even though it’s not really their fault). It gets a little freaky, but it was alright. 👍..." Read more
"...The characters are vividly portrayed, adding depth to the narrative...." Read more
"...There are however some things I didn't like. I think that the characters are very thin...." Read more
Reviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Many have read this book early in their youth, most likely as part of their educational upbringing. 1984 and Animal Farm are standard, pedantic texts battle ready for disaffected youth to sink their teeth into. This book, among the greats, seems boundless in the echoes and touchstones resounding within its tome. In revisiting the text many years later, one will find that Orwell’s words seem strangely even more relevant than they were at first blanch. Perhaps even more so than they were when original meted out and scratched into paper during the author’s self-imposed exile in the Scottish isle that was his final home so many years ago.
There are so many elements here that have such deep and broad depth that will keep this work of literature relevant for many more years. Orwell invented the terms “Big Brother” and “Thought Crime” and dove unrepentantly into issues of privacy, personal freedom and individualism. All this before the revolution of the internet! He also fretted over the degradation of language (OMG!) and the breakdown and bastardization of society’s communal bonds, family bonds, bonds of friendship and the abolishment of simple love. His vision of a mechanized society (one that even turns books out by machines), is more than a decry by a luddite so much as it concerns the debasement or obliteration of the individual and sense of self.
Orwell’s main thrust seems to be right at the heart of man and the core inner lust for domination and power, simply for its own sake. That ever-present evolutionary tendency to thrive at all costs without purpose or direction, and the ability of that singular impetus to take over and distort all else toward its own end. He digs that up out of the blackest parts of the human heart and disgorges it upon the shoreline of society receding tide as if to say, “This too is what you are. Do not kid yourself.”
For me, this book was rough. The tone was bleak. Throughout. Unflinchingly somber and hopeless. Yet, the story of the protagonist and his struggle amid this world turned upside down, is relatable and believable. Despite the obvious despair and immeasurable odds, we do feel for Winston Smith (the protagonist) and we do root for him. We follow him in his desperation to find something, some way to express himself and make a dent in the impenetrable wall that has become the totalitarian society which he is a part. We feel his constant fear and ever present distrust of everything—almost. The little glimmers of possibilities, even when they are squashed, keep your interest and balance the grim-gray that pervades everything.
One thing that struck me was that the female character Julia, is an interesting addition. She has a good amount of gumption and serves more than just a goal or love interest. She is fleshed out pretty well and adds a lot of dimension to the story by sharing the protagonist’s goals, but also coming from a slightly different more realistic viewpoint.
Another thing I found interesting in reading this book in present time was how insular the story is. We are just as stuck as the protagonist. All news of the outside world and the society is filtered to the reader through the regime in power. We never really know who to trust or when something might be real or made up or mere speculation. Nothing ever really seems certain. The story never ever escapes this – there is never an Oz-like “Man behind the Curtain” moment. Not really. We are told how some things work, and sometimes by sources that are deemed more reliable than others, but we don’t truly find out.
This tight view point, keeps up a claustrophobic feeling that forces the storyline to remain connected to the protagonist’s individual struggle. Even though Winston Smith is concerned with larger concepts and a revolutionary struggle on a society level–the story remains individualistic. However, the tale is not a man’s struggle with himself, it is a man’s struggle to find himself among others; the interrelatedness of things and how important that is. The totalitarian regime in power has distorted this effect and is manifesting control by continually putting up road blocks and pseudo-constructed, societal norms to hamper true progress and growth.
Even still, the individual struggles to find their place in society. As the story goes on, I think it is clear that most of this doomed society continues to struggle with this. And the powers that be, must expend an immense amount of effort and expense to constantly suppress this. In the end, can that really work? Have a care. Big Brother is watching.
Podcast: If you enjoy my review (or this topic) this book and the movie based on it were further discussed/debated in a lively discussion on my podcast: "No Deodorant In Outer Space". The podcast is available on iTunes, YouTube or our website.
“The Party” is described as an unknown higher power that has total influence over its citizens. It is clear that the Party has manipulated its citizens to think in a “certain way”. One way they manipulate the citizens is the rewritten text from the past. The mutability of history causes citizens to believe that some make believe figures and events actually existed when in reality, it was created in favor of the Party. This is described when Orwell states “Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Winston participated in this when he invented a figure named “Comrade Ogilvy”. This idea is a parallel to real life because in different countries, certain events are rewritten to appear patriotic towards the country. Another example of government manipulation is the widespread propaganda. Citizens were forced to view advertisements of hate towards “The Brotherhood” (anti-government) group and Goldstein (Brotherhood leader). Citizens also participated in a week long event called “Hate Week” which was designed to ignite anger and hatred towards the “enemy”. Telescreens were also posted everywhere in order to keep track of the citizens' lives. These ideas are controversial to today’s society. Many are weary of the government spying on our actions through webcams and cell phones. During election season, propaganda of leaders can be seen to create hate similar to how the Party forces propaganda to its citizens. There are three slogans the Party lives by: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”. Citizens of Oceania live by these quotes believing it is the correct ideas because the Party constantly repeats it. The parallel for this is that there are certain ideas that some countries live by that overall can be dangerous towards its citizens. The idea of government manipulation in 1984 is an eye-opening experience to read and will make any reader question whether any of these practices are happening in their real life.
Social class issues were presented with the story through a concept called “Inner Party” and “Outer Party”. The “Inner Party” is the high and elite class of citizens of Oceania and they have less privileges than the “Outer Party”. The “Outer Party” is described as the “middle class” of the story. Most are given government jobs however, they are the most threatening to the government because they are intelligent enough to start a revolution. There are also the “Proles” that have poorer conditions than the “Outer Power” and makes up 85% of the population. The Party controls the “Proles” by exposing them to vices such as alcohol and pornography; furthermore, they are considered and viewed as animals. This social class system can be seen in today’s society. For example, in the United States, the “Inner Party” is compared to the “Top 1%”. The “Outer Party” makes up the middle working class. Though not as extreme as described in the book, the “Proles” can compare to the rest of America’s population: low working wages and mostly involved in vices as well. In the book, Winston writes “If there is any hope, it lies with the Proles” meaning that if there is any hope for change for the regime, it would start the majority of the population. This is an idea that is popular in American politics. Leaders tend to campaign towards the low working class population because they know there is more of “them” in the population to vote. This theme can bring attention to the reader and persuade them to understand how their society is composed and “controlled by the government”.
“1984” was one of the first books to explore the ideas of change and “free thinking”. This caused many institutions to ban this book, which is ironic because censorship was one of the ways the Party manipulated its citizens. I would recommend this book to encourage conversations about individualism and power.
Top reviews from other countries
Writing a critique about Britain’s social stratification and economic inequality in Animal Farm. And, the dangers of the corruption of the revolution. Whilst warning about the great existential threat of authoritarianism in the later story 1984.
In this novel, the author does an excellent job of imagining what ordinary people endure in a modern totalitarian state e.g. Soviet Russia in the past and North Korea today. The deification of the great leader.Mind control through the manipulation of culture (Hate Week), language (Newspeak) and memory (redacting history).
In a mere dictatorship, the masses are cowed by the threat of violence. In the 20th Century, total control would ensure total obedience because people would have no other point of reference. Ordinary people are turned against each other. Dissidents become fervent believers in the state.
In a world full of conflict and fear, there is the great temptation of creating an Islamist state, fundamentalist society, or super empire. One ring to rule them all!!!!
Great book, a must read.
Great book, a must read.
Great book, a must read.
Great book, a must read.
Great book, a must read.
Ok ok



















