Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.

“Orwellian” has entered the vocabulary as a shorthand adjective for the abiding fear of the twentieth century, that we would all become unpersons at the mercy of Big Brother. A jackboot would be stamping on the human face for ever, in George Orwell’s unforgettable image. Franz Kafka is the only other writer to have given his name to a personal vision of our dehumanized age. We can only wonder yet again at the almost miraculous strength of imagination whereby two such unlikely individuals were able to envisage a totalitarian future with such clarity and brio that they also distilled antidotes.

Both writers were evidently defending themselves against victimization. Kakfa was perhaps born a victim, if only of his nervous system. Not so Orwell. With his gaunt face, wavy hair, and sergeant-major’s moustache, he was combative. He was often rude to people, sometimes to their face, glad to abuse the likes of Auden and Spender as “pansies,” brutally dismissive in print of books he judged worthless. He struck people—for instance once fighting with a drunken Rayner Heppenstall—and he nurtured fantasies about bayoneting the Burmese and Indians whom in his early career he was policing. Yet his imagination contradictorily placed him on the side of victims. He was outraged by bullying at school, by society’s indifference to the poor, by colonial repression, by the tyranny of fascism and Communism. The lesser cruelties wove seamlessly into the greater.