George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949

On 8 June 1949, the London firm Secker & Warburg published George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — the dystopia that has shaped how we talk about surveillance and propaganda ever since. It was Orwell’s last book; he finished it while gravely ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him barely seven months later.

The novel follows Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the Party that rules the superstate of Oceania, where the past is rewritten to suit the present, language is deliberately starved of meaning, and the face of Big Brother watches from every wall. Encyclopædia Britannica sums it up plainly as a warning against totalitarianism — and the warning outlived its author.

‘Big Brother’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thoughtcrime’ and the all-purpose ‘Orwellian’ are now used freely by people who have never read a word of it.

Its invented vocabulary soon escaped the page. Few final works have cast a longer shadow.