Culture | Orwell mania

Interest in George Orwell and his dystopian fiction is high

But while warning of one kind of “doublethink”, was he blind to another?

An array of television screens depicting Orwell, eyeballs and his wife — Image: Ben Jones

Aug 4th 2023

FEW WRITERS have achieved the cult status of George Orwell. He is so much a part of the collective imagination that John Rodden, an Orwell scholar, goes so far as to call him “the most important writer who ever lived”. He was not the best writer of his time, explains Mr Rodden, author of several books on the writer’s “afterlife”, but his universal recognition, continuous publication and repeated spikes in popularity are “an unprecedented phenomenon rivalled only by Shakespeare himself”.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Man of the hours”