Despite not being a big fan of biographies, I am very much enjoying The Ministry of Truth: A biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey, which, with its focus on the book, tells the story of Orwell in a fascinating new (to me) light. It’s also a great way of talking about the impact of the world on Orwell’s thinking, and the impact of Orwell’s writing on the world.
Books like these are filled with great ideas and wonderful small nuggets of information. My favorite is the word Orwellian was coined by Mary
McCarthy, in her essay on fashion magazines “Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue” published in The Reporter on August 1, 1950.
The Orwellian future was a “without content or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage”, McCarthy continues
The articles, in fact, seem meant not to be read but inhaled like a whiff of scent from the mystic… Nobody, one imagines, has read them, not even their authors: Grammatical sentences are arranged around a vanishing point of meaning.
Text, without content, that hasn’t been read, and nobody will read… But it will be consumed.