1984

Indeed, the world of Oceania in George Orwell's famous novel is routinely described as oppressive, and hopeless, and variously deemed a horror story, an elegy, a threnody, a shriek of terror, a wail of despair, a death cry. Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, referred to it in 1955-in the wake of the controversial BBC broadcasts and their "fatal" consequences-as the "Black Millennium," when George Orwell turned a segment of time forever into charcoal dust. Li ...