A Q&A between Ben Greenman and Louis Menaud. This is a great line: “[Orwell] tried to be swayed by women; he was just unlucky.”
Menaud's article, Honest, Decent, Wrong: The invention of George Orwell is also available online:
"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as "liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. [...] The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to "1984."
