In an interview on Books that Changed the World

1984 by George Orwell.

This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient. Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because, like Dickens, and a bit like me, he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now.

He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies.

Orwell saw the death of the dream at first hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises.

His hero Winston, named, of course, after Winston Churchill, is betrayed even by the one person he thinks he can totally love and trust. He is broken forever by Big Brother, and the novel’s horrendous ending – with the rat and the face and the thing that he most fears breaking his spirit – is unforgettable.

1984 is a novel that changed the world by warning it of the consequences of bigger and bigger blocks of power, more and more lies, and citizens being spied on by authority.