STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Time to return to dystopia
We're now living though the scenarios predicted in novels like 1984 and Brave New World. What can we learn from them about the world today, asks JOHN GREEN
Dystopia now: Brave New World on film
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 has been the Bible of anti-communist crusaders for generations and it’s a permanent fixture on reading lists in schools and colleges.
Yet other dystopian novels like Brave New World, written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley — 17 years before Orwell’s work — or Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) are largely unknown today. Why would that be?
1984 was used not only to vilify the Soviet Union but communist and socialist ideas in general. Everyone is aware of the concepts of Big Brother, Newspeak and Doublethink. It’s not really surprising that Huxley’s fiction, probably inspired by the Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, is not better known because its premise that it is capitalism taking us down the road to uniformity and loss of individualism is not one the ruling elite wish to see promoted.
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