Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used N...

Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and th...

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps o… The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark ribbons of the chimne… Veer downward; flicked by whips of… Torn posters flutter; coldly sound

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connection between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explain...

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor....

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two s...

A happy vicar I might have been Two hundred years ago To preach upon eternal doom And watch my walnuts grow; But born, alas, in an evil time,

Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucen...

The Italian soldier shook my hand Beside the guard—room table; The strong hand and the subtle han… Whose palms are only able To meet within the sounds of guns,

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I dreamt—’ he began, and stopped shor...

Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, already fairly well known under the guise of ‘children’s books’ (which the...

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering whit...