Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O’Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O’Brien: You do not exist.

Baumauer secretly fears Kalist – and Kalist knows it.

Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.

He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.

An overnight bag with the company logo – a white silhouette of a finch (which once perched on the curved back of a stallion representing cofounder, Orwell, but has now been ‘adjusted’) – sits motionless...

Baumauer has been lured into the exhausting habit of supplying Kalist with ever more exceptional quality work just to appease him and often survives all day and all evening without food, but Maxwell D. Kalist...

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too...

Don’t suffocate in there.

power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the...

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

You’re a fat cunt and you can’t add up to save your life.” Dimitri Pissec.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a...

You need a father figure in your life.

The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the...

If there’s grass on the pitch,” and gives his small cock a quick squeeze under the desk.

Opposite Pissec sits ghoulish Gottfried Baumauer, a tall, skinny workaholic with dark-ringed eye sockets and long, yellowing smoker’s fingers. He’s thirty-eight. He doesn’t say much. He drinks a lot of tea – likes it strong...

I hate working with sexy women.” Dimitri Pissec.

Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The...

You’ve never really loved your wife, have you, Ridley?

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had...

Pissec approaches Pamela Geiger’s cubicle, itching in rhythm with her. He wants to ask her a question while Kalist is out of earshot. She’s not a grass, he’s sure, but stupid people die first.

Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden...

A black-haired bitch with man’s hands, widow Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch makes all the important decisions. She is a power-hungry dominatrix. Orwell is her slave. (No one ever sees him.)

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one...

The answer to 1984 is 1776

Only men with intelligence, confidence and absolutely no empathy at all can progress upstairs.

The beagles are partying under Geiger’s desk.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had ‘given’ their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had...

Do I need to fire the little prat yet?” Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch.

It’s late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere...

Heads swivel. Whispers erupt. As Kalist returns to his desk, bone cane by his side, he indulges, briefly, in horse practice, neighing lightly as he scrolls through a few mental images of busty secretary, Geiger,...

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the...

Obelmäker is eating at his desk, a habit both Baumauer and Pissec find repulsive.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and...

Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.

Each day of the week, Kalist indulges himself in a different, secret ritual. On Mondays, he wears cologne. On Tuesdays, he eats meat for lunch. On Wednesdays, he places a bet after work. On Thursdays,...

Bride of Beimerstetten, bride of Beimerstetten, bride of Beimerstetten, naked bride of Beimerstetten,” and he imagines a procession of proud military men blowing trumpets as they stomp through a bomb-devastated town to the tune of...

But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics...

I’m warning you because you’re young and vulnerable. He’s a dirty, lying, conniving piece of shit and he’s dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he...

To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

Kalist is in his office with the door shut, secretly adding the final touches to his new Brichacek doll; she’s got rosy, plaster cheeks and his nose hairs for pubes, although he thinks he might...

Baumauer wants a life in which he cannot be belittled, judged or controlled by worse men.

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread...

Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.

Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to dootherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, todo what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

Shame comes in different doses.

Kalist likes to listen to the collective voices swell as more individuals in his colony arrive.