Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: PART ONE -- 1.History Stopped -- 2.Utopia Fever -- 3.The World We're Going Down Into -- 4.Wells-World -- 5.Radio Orwell -- 6.The Heretic -- 7.Inconvenient Facts -- 8.Every Book Is a Failure -- 9.The Clocks Strike Thirteen -- PART TWO -- 10.Black Millennium -- 11.So Damned Scared -- 12.Orwellmania -- 13.Oceania 2.0.

George Orwell's last novel has become one of the iconic narratives of the modern world. Its ideas have become part of the language - from 'Big Brother' to the 'Thought Police', 'Doublethink', and 'Newspeak' - and seem ever more relevant in the era of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', while the cultural influence of 1984 ranges from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, from the launch of Apple Mac to the reality TV landmark, Big Brother. In this book, Dorian Lynskey investigates Orwell's formative experiences from the Spanish Civil War and war-time London to his book's roots in utopian and dystopian fiction. And he explores the phenomenon that the novel became on publication and the changing ways in which it has been read over the decades since.