Word: portent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...midnight calls of the secret police. He worked his way through the anonymous, self-anointed inner core of the party to its all-highest Politburo, to be Deputy Premier of the U.S.S.R. His rise to a position within touching distance of Stalin's mantle bears considerable portent. After more than three decades, the vast power of the old Communist revolutionaries is passing into the grip of younger men whom they taught and trained...
...Four. He was mortally ill with tuberculosis when he wrote it. But Orwell's mind had never been more lucid. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the grimmest, the most logically imagined and credible preview of the totalitarian state in print.* It is not so much a satire as a portent. The 18th Century's great Dean Swift, whom Orwell admired and to whom he has been compared, is at best a distant literary cousin. Gulliver's Travels discursively, and sometimes vindictively, pilloried comparatively commonplace human failings. Orwell projected with terrible urgency the final shape of a modern...
...refused to let me spend a night beneath their roof." Monica hurried to sanctuary with an aunt in Sussex, then on to visit her uncle, Stanley Baldwin. But not even an ex-Prime Minister could preserve her from the sight of American soldiers pinching British womanhood, or -most "sinister portent" of all-"the spectacle of London without her railings. It was almost like seeing Queen Victoria without her clothes ... The parks . .. the sacrosanct squares . . . flung open to the vandal incursions of children and dogs." Even that oak of ages, the English language, had changed. Monica heard for the first time...