An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the memoir of an ambitious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed popularity owed to the relevance of a nearly 70-year-old vision of shabby...