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21 unusual facts about Nineteen Eighty-Four


11020 Orwell

George Orwell is the pseudonym of British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), forever associated with the year of discovery, 1984, due to the enduring popularity of his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

24-hour analog dial

George Orwell uses the 12-hour and 24-hour dials to symbolize the old and new worlds in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A Pair of Brown Eyes

The music video for "A Pair of Brown Eyes" was directed in 1985 by Alex Cox and was set in a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque Britain with Margaret Thatcher in the place of Big Brother as a supreme, god-like authoritarian figure.

Antonio Saura

Starting in 1959 he began creating a prolific body of works in print, illustrating numerous books including Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nöstlinger’s adaptation of Pinocchio, Kafka’s Tagebücher, Quevedo’s Three Visions, and many others.

Bertrand Latour

He also wrote the preface to the first Vietnamese translation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Editions Underbahn, 2006).

Calliopean Society

For many decades, the Calliopean Society had no physical location, listing itself as located at "1985 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520." Its 1985 box number had been chosen to refer to the inevitable victory of the West over the collectivist totalitarianism described in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Cigar Dave

The "Pleasure Police" and "Big Pleasure" are plays on George Orwell's "Thought Police" and "Big Brother" themes from the novel 1984, where governments and corporations combine mass surveillance assets to oversee all aspects of an individual's professional and personal life.

Crass Records

The catalogue numbers of Crass Records releases were intended to represent a countdown to the year 1984 (e.g., 521984 meaning "five years until 1984"), both the year that Crass stated that they would split up, and a date charged with significance in the anti-authoritarian calendar due to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Emily Blandish

They both travelled forwards in time to an alternative 1984 (based on the novel by George Orwell), where they spent time trying to work out how to get back to their own time — which they ultimately did, whilst also ensuring that the future they had witnessed never came about.

Eugène Lanti

It has been suggested that Orwell included elements of Esperanto in the "Newspeak" language he created in his anti-totalitarian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Geneviève Dieudonné

She read Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, Dracula, Big Brother, I Am Legend, and On the Beach when they came out, and for a time wished to be an astronaut after reading works of Arthur C. Clarke.

Hans Bemmann

The idea of manipulation by systematic use of language is also present in George Orwell's dystopia 1984.

Honoré Lechasseur

They both travelled forwards in time to an alternative 1984 (based on the novel by George Orwell), where they spent time trying to work out how to get back to their own time – which they ultimately did, whilst also ensuring that the future they had witnessed never came about.

In a Model Room

The songs on the album talk about the sociopolitical issues of Japan at the time, during the Japanese post-war economic miracle and were partially influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell comma

It is so named because the temperament eliminating this comma, Orwell temperament, has an optimal generator very close to 19 steps out of 84-equal temperament; this pattern of 19/84 steps is similar to the title of Orwell's novel 1984.

Scalable Urban Traffic Control

-- the following sentence might be too long and complex --> Surveillance of public places with CCTV networks has been criticized as enabling totalitarian forms of government by undermining people's ability to move about anonymously, as anticipated in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Someone's Looking at You

It is an organ-based song that paints a humid picture of 1984-style government surveillance and has been described as a gently humorous song about paranoia.

The Miserable Mill

Her building is designed to resemble a great eye, which is a likely allusion to the famous figure from Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother, who is proverbially "watching" at all times; some editions of 1984 feature one or more eyeballs on the cover.

Thirteenth stroke of the clock

The most famous is the first line in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when it starts with, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.".

Thought Criminals

The band’s name was derived from the concept of ‘thoughtcrimes’ (unapproved thoughts) from George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We Are the Pigs

The video, directed by David and Raphael Vital-Durand, features a grim, Nineteen Eighty-Four-like setting.


Captain Britain Corps

The Corps, not only consists of alternative versions of Brian Braddock from throughout the multiverse, but also characters representing a vast array of different worlds, such as Hauptmann Englande, a member representing a world where Nazis won World War II and Captain Airstrip-One from a world based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, while some even vary in species, like an animal version and even more exotic forms.

Rolf Dudley-Williams

During the 1954 controversy over Rudolph Cartier's television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Williams attacked "the tendency, evident in recent British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes, notably on Sunday evenings, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes".

Second Thoughts on James Burnham

Michael Shelden saw Burnham's work and Orwell's analysis as having an influence on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Social chauvinism

It is this concept which lies behind the first motto of the tripartite series of George Orwell in his novel which was published in 1949, titled Nineteen Eighty-Four: War is Peace.

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

In another New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani writes that in this book Lessing has "narrowed her cosmic focus to a specific issue, namely the manipulative use of language and words" which, she believes, was handled with "more acerbity and more humour" by George Orwell in Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

United States v. Kincade

The plurality rejects the dissent's argument that this sets into motion an Orwellian 1984 scenario where everyone could potentially be required to submit to a DNA test.