Abstract

George Orwell is today nothing less than a cultural icon. I typed Orwell
into the newspaper database LexisLibrary and over a three-month
period alone in the national newspapers he had been mentioned 153
times – and he’s been dead more than 60 years: Salman Rushdie could only
manage 130 mentions; Martin Amis 46; Angela Carter 39.
Significantly, Timothy Garton Ash in his ‘Introduction’ to Orwell and Politics
(2001: xi) describes Orwell as the most influential political writer of the
twentieth century. But Christopher Hitchens, who joined the Odd Squad after
his post 9/11 conversion to the gospel according to George Bush, was right
when he said:
George Orwell requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and
moist hankies; since he’s become an object of sickly veneration and
sentimental over-praise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his
insufferable rightness and purity (Hitchens 2002: 3).