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.

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.

Obelmäker always suspected Kalist of being a driven man with a determined selfishness that verged on sociopathic, but he actually appears to be suffering for once, in a humane way, like one who has been...

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our...

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

Don’t mock my suggestions, Ridley – one day in the near future, they might just save your life.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

die Schwachen ein,” – the vulnerable one – after he cried like a child when he sliced two, thin strips of skin off his own index finger using a cheese grater (accidentally) one night when...

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

George Orwell famously described international sport as ‘war minus the shooting’. But for all Orwell’s greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to ‘murder minus the death’ or ‘life...

His manhood sways briefly, then comes to a standstill.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

Stop flirting,” he tells her, but he looks at her breasts and thinks, The girls with the bruises in the sex films are just dead dolls, but this pretty toy is alive.

Obelmäker is a deeply fearful person and terribly indecisive. Even when he makes a choice, it’s usually bad.

And don’t drop food.

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.’White to play and mate in two moves.’Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother....

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...