Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four have surged since Donald Trump arrived in the White House. George Orwell’s nightmarish, dystopian world of doublethink and Big Brother seems even more relevant now in a world of fake news and alternative facts. In this compelling book, Dennis Glover brings alive Orwell’s life and the experiences and influences that fed into the creation of the book he saw as his legacy.

These experiences included fighting in the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell read newspaper accounts of battles he knew hadn’t taken place. The Stalin show trials of the 1930s left him feeling that ‘the revolution was finally dead, and some dreadful new form of society had taken its place’. Orwell was also ill with the tuberculosis that killed him, and writing The Last Man in Europe (his original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four) became a race against time as he tried to complete the book before he died. Isolating himself in a primitive farmhouse on a remote Scottish island during the bleak winter of 1946–47 allowed him to concentrate on writing, but it further damaged his health. Glover has captured Orwell’s voice and style, as well as his life, loves and mental and physical torments (his self-doubt and the horrifying TB treatments he undergoes are wonderfully evoked), in this intelligent, moving book.

In a world where the power of the media and other traditional establishments is being weakened by ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’, where clickbait articles about celebrities generate hits while corruption or secret deals go unreported, Orwell’s vision feel as fresh and relevant today as when he was writing in the mid-1940s. Read this and then re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Reviewed by Melinda Woledge