Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities. In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret...

Reilly draws a parallel between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Gulliver's Travels; he discusses the novel in terms of the myth, Jack the Giant-Killer; and he shows how Orwell charted the decline of religion.

April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-three years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that within three winters will take his life, Orwell comes to see the book as his legacy--the culmination of a career spent fighting to preserve the freedoms which the wars and upheavals of the twentieth century have threatened. Completing the book is an urgent...