Word: nineteen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Where did he stand, finally? He called himself "a man of the left," realizing that most of his allies shied away from or repudiated his maverick views. In fact, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have long been embraced by the right as anti-revolutionary tracts. Yet such terms shift with time; what was left 20 years ago could be mainstream now and reactionary by 2001, or vice versa. Orwell's work has proved itself, with some exceptions, grounded on bedrock...
...bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." To that end, Orwell devoted his life. His work endures, as lucid and vigorous as the day it was written. The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers-1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty-Four-but as a man of letters, who wanted to change the world by changing the word. A word that surely requires alteration today has been misused since the '50s. The author's name is not a synonym for totalitarianism. It is in fact the spirit that...
...Happy 1984." This concludes a New York Times editorial criticizing the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the "Orwellian arguments" for it given by the Reagan Administration. The implication is clumsy but clear: Nineteen Eighty-Four and its author stand behind the Times's position. But a week or so earlier, the same newspaper's Op-Ed page ran a defense of the Grenada action by Neo-Conservative Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. And Podhoretz had by then firmly claimed Orwell for his camp of disillusioned liberals: "I believe he [Orwell] would have been a neo-conservative...
Before Orwell's name becomes as muddled and mythologized as Nineteen Eighty-Four, the testimony of personal friends who would not have dreamed of predicting his views, on any subject, might be heeded. "I understood him up to a point," says Author V.S. Pritchett. "It was hard to define him because just when you had fixed on a view, he would contradict it." Novelist Julian Symons remembers "a quality of perversity" in Orwell: "He had a characteristic directness which upset people and made him a lot of enemies." Malcolm Muggeridge recalls a man "who utterly despised intellectuals and people...
...only Nazis and Stalinists and all advocates of the expedient lie but the solipsism of much modern philosophy and literature. Theories that reality is simply the spider web of word spinners left him aghast; that way lay the dictatorship of the speaker and, ultimately, the abstract, ominous slogans of Nineteen Eighty-Four: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH...