Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'George Orwell'

July 21, 2026

A Mugg’s Game

“Write what should not be forgotten” —Isabel Allende For over half a century, no other journalist/political commentator/frustrated novelist had the impact of Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990). Yet he is largely forgotten today. Continue Reading...
August 15, 2025

Animal Farm at 80

On August 17, 1945—just two days after V-J Day in Asia and fewer than two weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—George Orwell published what he modestly called his “little squib”: Animal Farm. Continue Reading...
June 20, 2024

How the Most Influential Novel Ever Written Has Been Misunderstood

“You have no real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston.” —Syme to Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four For 75 years, the number “1984” has represented a numerical nightmare. Those four digits have been brandished in screaming headlines, blaring soundbites, a BBC teleplay that resulted in heart attacks and even deaths of viewers (in December 1954), and the Washington hotline of the John Birch Society, the far-right American advocacy group. Continue Reading...
October 17, 2023

How Did George Orwell Know?

The collocation in the title captures the thoroughgoing exploration of the topic in a phrase: George Orwell and Russia. Masha Karp is not the first to ponder George Orwell’s relationship to Stalinist Russia—and the relationship of both Stalinist and post-communist Russia to Orwell—but she is the first to frame a comprehensive, well-researched study around them. Continue Reading...
June 07, 2022

Why Nineteen Eighty-Four still matters

June 8 marks the anniversary of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That a greater gap separates us from 1984 than 1984 from Nineteen-Eighty Four’s 1949 publication staggers. The book, at least in terms of pundits’ invoking it, seems so very 2022 even if the script dictated that its peak as a cultural touchstone would occur in 1984. Continue Reading...
November 26, 2013

‘Catching Fire’ and the Call to Freedom

Last weekend the second film based on the immensely popular Hunger Games series of books, Catching Fire, opened in theaters. One interesting way to view the world of Panem, Suzanne Collins’ totalitarian society that serves as the setting for the drama, is as a synthesis of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Continue Reading...