The roots of Orwell’s obsession with the totalitarian mind are strewn all over his life in the late 1930s and the early 1940s.1 Naturally, they can be found in the books he read and in the books he wrote himself, but they would also have been sharply apparent in some of the international news that sprang each morning from the pages of his daily newspaper. In the third category, he would certainly have taken an interest in the widely reported Soviet show trials of 1938, which led to the deaths of erstwhile pillars of the regime such as Genrikh Yagoda, Alexei Rykoff, and Nikolai Bukharin, and of which The Times’s special correspondent in Moscow remarked: “According to Soviet law, crime and the intent to commit crime are virtually the same thing . . . . In the coming trial the prosecution expects to show that the accused premeditated certain crimes though they never committed them—and therefore are little less guilty than if the crimes had actually been committed.” It was in 1938, too, that he read Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Utopia, a memoir by the United Press Agency’s Moscow correspondent from 1928 to 1934, with its incriminating reportage from a world in which the leader’s portrait hung in every apartment, children denounced their parents as traitors, and even making an inappropriate gesture could lead to arrest and imprisonment.

But all this is to ignore Orwell’s growing interest in the burgeoning genre of dystopian literature—novels set