This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s iconic book 1984. Seven decades later this book still influences how we think about politics, power, truth, lies, surveillance, and totalitarianism. It could be argue that this is the most significant book of the Twentieth Century. Today we are in conversation about the history of Orwell’s 1984 and how it came to be in 1949 and it’s influence throughout the years.
Guest: Dorian Lynskey is a British writer and journalist who has been covering music, film, and politics for more than twenty years. He is the author of the book The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984.
About The Ministry of Truth
This is the first book that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the Utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Great Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history…
