Word: orwellianisms
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...Baby Sitters by John Salisbury (Atheneum; $9.95). John Salisbury is the well-guarded nom de plume of a fortyish British historian, political writer and playwright-which adds spice to his first political thriller right from page 1. It is the story of an Orwellian attempt (in 1981) to turn Britain into a fascist state, led by a fanatical Muslim group riding high on Arab oil and abetted by some of England's leading politicians. The conspiracy is defused by Bill Ellison, a brilliant Fleet Street digger whose investigative team resembles the London Sunday Times's muckraking groups. Salisbury...
...India, a collection of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, Ved Mehta traces the corrosive effect of unchallenged political power during what he calls an "Orwellian passage of time." Mehta, who was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for many years, recognized from the beginning how dangerous a path Mrs. Gandhi had chosen. By her action, he wrote, "she risked making it possible for politicians, much more ruthless and power-hungry than she, one day to dislodge her and perpetrate abuses of power previously unimagined...
When James Herriot writes about his animal farm, it doesn't have the Orwellian bite. Rather, in a series of bestsellers named after the lyrics of an Anglican hymn (All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, AH Things Wise and Wonderful), the Scots-born veterinarian has painted a bucolic picture of his life ministering to four-legged friends in Yorkshire. Herriot, 61, who started writing at 50, now is consulting on scripts for the BBC, which has just begun to air a series based on his work. With it all, Herriot, a pseudonym for James Alfred...
COINTELPRO. The name itself sounds Orwellian. The late J. Edgar Hoover's aides invented the acronym in 1956. It stood for Counterintelligence Program, a secret, often illegal FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage against a wide variety of right-and left-wing groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Not until 1971, a year before his death, did Hoover, alarmed by the threat of exposure, suspend the program. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence exposed the full scope of COINTELPRO'S partly unconstitutional mission in 1975, but only last...
Munro may now be in line for another reprimand. The cause: a stinging seven-part series on human rights in China?or the lack of them?that has run in the Globe and seven U.S. dailies. In this series, Munro's China appears as an Orwellian hell where a citizen can still be executed merely for "preaching counterrevolutionary slogans," where freedom of movement and career choice are all but nonexistent, and where authorities discriminate against relatives of former petty landowners. In one telling vignette, Munro writes of a man who insists that local postal clerks read his letters...