In recent years George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) has twice been returned to bestseller lists around the world – in the wake of the United States National Security Agency’s global surveillance scandal, and following Donald Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway’s decidedly Orwellian coinage of ‘alternative facts’ while defending the White House’s false claims about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.

Few other novels have colonised the public consciousness so widely. We turn to it to make sense of the seemingly senseless, combing its ingenious totalitarian vocabulary –Newspeak, thoughtcrime, doublethink, and all the rest – for clues as to how the English language has become so degraded, and how our politics have descended into sinister farce. (Orwell’s essential point, of course, was that the two are inextricably linked.) It seems, in some ways, a curious fate for a work of fiction so coloured by the circumstances in which it was written, so plainly the product of postwar Britain’s grim austerity. The novel’s topography, as Orwell biographer D.J. Taylor noted, is based on ‘the three or four square miles centered on Oxford Street and its immediate hinterlands’.