1984 turns 60

In the Sunday Times, Robert Harris celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of 1984, “certainly the most influential” novel ever written — and the work that destroyed George Orwell’s health, leaving him to be “killed by his own creation.”

As I write, the Daily Mail is reporting that “town halls are routinely using controversial ‘Big Brother’ surveillance laws to spy on their own employees”; the Los Angeles Times is describing a Republican party consultant as “a master of the black art of political newspeak”; The Village Voice is citing “a ripe example of doublethink”; and The Guardian is profiling a community leader “attacked as part of the PC thought police”.

Read the whole thing. Harris notes that 1984‘s importance extends beyond its excoriation of totalitarianism:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a standing rebuke to all those who think history or biography can ever be superior to the novel. Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreens, Doublethink, the Two-Minute Hate, the Ministry of Love, 2+2=5, Airstrip One, unperson – one has only to list the words to realise how central Nineteen Eighty-Four has become to our collective imagination. But what put the ideas there in the first place, and what keeps them there still, is the story of Winston Smith and his doomed love affair with Julia, the girl in the oily overalls who works on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.

Orwell, ravaged by TB, died six months after it was published.

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