100 Fun Facts About Nineteen Eighty-Four

Which satire preceded Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Animal Farm was turned down by several publishers, T. S. Eliot among them, before it appeared in 1945. Its success made Orwell's name, and the dystopia he wrote as a follow-up was his last book.

What is the name of Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist?

Winston Smith begins his revolt by opening a diary. Nothing is illegal, since there are no longer any laws, yet he expects death or 25 years in a labour camp if he is caught.

What has Great Britain been renamed in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Airstrip One is no longer a country at all, only the third most populous province of a superstate. The hero recalls it was once England or Britain, though he feels fairly certain London was always London.

Which superstate is home to Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist?

Oceania takes in the Americas, the British Isles, Australasia and southern Africa. It is always at war with one of its two rivals, and whenever the enemy changes, the records are rewritten to match.

What is the Party's ruling ideology called in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Ingsoc is short for 'English Socialism'. Orwell wrote as a democratic socialist himself, and meant the Party's creed as a perversion of the ideals he held.

Where does Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist work?

The Ministry of Truth is where he falsifies old newspapers for a living. Its sister ministries are named the same way: the one called Peace wages war, and the one called Love runs the torture cells.

Which group makes up 85 per cent of the population in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The proles are left almost unwatched, because the Party thinks them too dull to rebel. The hero disagrees: he writes in his diary that if there is hope, it lies with them.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's slogans run: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is what?

Strength completes the set, and the slogans are meant in earnest: a forbidden book explains that a war which never ends keeps the rulers as secure as a lasting peace would.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what are the two-way devices that watch Party members at home called?

Telescreens can be turned down but never off in an ordinary home. The hero is stunned when a senior official casually switches his own off: only the Inner Party has that privilege.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what are the ducts where unwanted documents are dropped for burning called?

Memory holes whirl paper away to hidden furnaces. The name outlived the novel: to send an awkward fact 'down the memory hole' now means to make it quietly disappear.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is someone called once the Party has erased them from every record?

An unperson has, officially, never existed. Life later copied it: after secret-police chief Beria was shot, owners of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were told to cut out his entry and paste in pages on the Bering Sea.

Which shopkeeper sells Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist his diary and later rents him a room?

Mr Charrington, the kindly old antiques dealer, turns out to be an officer of the Thought Police. A device hidden behind a picture in the rented room had been listening all along.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which young woman begins a secret affair with the protagonist?

Julia makes the first move, slipping him a note at work that reads 'I love you'. Until then he had taken her for a spy, and had even pictured smashing her skull with a cobblestone.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hero's lover wears the scarlet sash of which fanatical organisation?

The Junior Anti-Sex League is her cover. She gives it three evenings a week while breaking every rule it stands for, on the principle that yelling with the crowd is the only way to be safe.

Which Nineteen Eighty-Four coinage names the trick of believing two contradictory things at once?

Doublethink lets a Party member tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them. The word outlived the book: 'doublespeak', which appears nowhere in the novel, was coined on its model in the 1950s.

Which Inner Party official pretends to recruit Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist into the resistance?

O'Brien is really a loyal agent of the Thought Police, and he becomes the hero's torturer. He tells his prisoner flatly that the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.

What is the supposed underground resistance movement in Nineteen Eighty-Four called?

The Brotherhood may be nothing but bait. The hero's interrogator says he will never learn whether it exists, and adds that he helped to write its secret handbook himself.

Who is the Party's official enemy of the people in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Emmanuel Goldstein echoes Trotsky, goatee beard included. Nobody is sure he even exists, yet not a day passes without fresh conspirators acting on his orders being unmasked.

What is the title of the forbidden book in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is whispered of simply as 'the book'. The hero reads how the Party holds power, but is arrested before he reaches the chapter on why.

What is Nineteen Eighty-Four's daily ritual of screaming at a film of the state's enemy called?

The Two Minutes Hate needs no acting. The hero finds it impossible not to join in: within thirty seconds he is shouting with the rest and kicking the rung of his chair.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a cut in which ration is announced a day later as a rise?

Chocolate drops from thirty grammes a week to twenty. A day later crowds are thanking their leader for raising it to twenty, and the hero seems to be the only one who remembers.

What is the Party's artificial, shrinking language called in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. The aim is to make heresy impossible, because there will be no words left in which to think it.

Which colleague of Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist is compiling a new edition of the Party's dictionary?

Syme adores the job and calls the destruction of words a beautiful thing. The hero predicts that a man who sees so clearly will not last, and one morning he is simply missing from work.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, why is the poet Ampleforth arrested?

He left the word 'God' in a Kipling poem because nothing else would rhyme with 'rod'. Even in the cells he looks almost pleased, like a pedant delighted by his problem.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, who denounces loyal Tom Parsons for cursing the Party in his sleep?

His young daughter, aged seven, listened at the keyhole and ran to the patrols. In the cells he is proud of her, and plans to thank the tribunal for saving him before it was too late.

What is the youth organisation the Parsons children belong to in Nineteen Eighty-Four called?

The Spies have made the Parsons children so fierce that the boy fires a catapult at the hero's neck and calls him a traitor, while their mother looks on in helpless fright.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is the hero's worst fear, used against him under torture?

Rats, in a wire cage made to fit over his face, are what finally break him. He screams for it to be done to the woman he loves instead, which is exactly the betrayal his captors wanted.

What is the number of the room in Nineteen Eighty-Four that holds each prisoner's worst nightmare?

101 is said to come from a BBC conference room where Orwell sat through tedious wartime meetings. The number is now shorthand for wherever a person's worst fear is waiting.

Which London building, wartime home of the Ministry of Information, inspired the hero's ministry in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Senate House, the University of London's white tower, held the wartime Ministry of Information. Orwell's first wife worked in its censorship department, so he knew from the inside the place he turned into a ministry of lies.

Which image does Nineteen Eighty-Four's torturer offer as a picture of the future?

A boot stamping on a face, for ever, is all he promises. The Party, he explains, is building no better world: what it wants is the thrill of trampling an enemy who is helpless.

Where does Nineteen Eighty-Four's freed hero spend his days in the closing pages?

The Chestnut Tree Café is where he now sits with his gin and a chessboard. Years before, he had watched three disgraced founders of the Party drinking there, shortly before they vanished for good.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what brand name is on the Party's oily gin and loosely packed cigarettes?

Victory is the label on everything shoddy. The gin goes down like nitric acid, and when the hero holds a cigarette upright the tobacco simply falls out on the floor.

What working title did Orwell drop for Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The Last Man in Europe was still in the running weeks before he finished. In the torture scenes the interrogator tells the broken hero: 'You are the last man.'

Orwell traced Nineteen Eighty-Four's fear of vanishing truth to which war he fought in?

The Spanish Civil War showed him newspapers reporting great battles where there had been no fighting. It left him afraid, he wrote, that 'the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world'.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four's Party slogan, whoever controls the present controls what?

The past, because whoever holds the present can rewrite every record of it. The slogan's other half names the prize: who controls the past controls the future.

Which Russian dystopian novel, reviewed by Orwell in 1946, helped shape Nineteen Eighty-Four?

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, was refused publication at home and first appeared in English. Its citizens are known only by numbers and live in glass houses, the easier for the political police to watch.

Orwell said which 1943 summit, the first meeting of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, gave him the idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The Tehran Conference convinced him that the three leaders meant to carve the world into zones of influence. In the novel that becomes three superstates, forever at war and forever changing sides.

What illness was Orwell diagnosed with after finishing the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Tuberculosis put him in a hospital near Glasgow, where a new American drug, streptomycin, was specially imported for him. He went back to his island to finish the book, and died seven months after it came out.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which antique bought by the hero is smashed on the hearth at his arrest?

A glass paperweight with a scrap of coral inside is his link to a vanished past. When the Thought Police burst in, one of them shatters it, and he is struck by how small the coral always was.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which real newspaper's back issues does the hero rewrite for a living?

The Times is corrected again and again, so that every forecast the Party ever made turns out right. Each altered issue is reprinted and the original destroyed, leaving no trace of the change.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, how are cheap novels for the masses produced?

By machines, and the hero's lover is one of the mechanics who service them. Even the hit song a washerwoman sings beneath his window was composed on a device, with no human hand involved.

Which actor played the hero in the 1984 film of Nineteen Eighty-Four?

John Hurt played him. The film's closing credits claim it was shot in and around London from April to June 1984, the exact time and setting Orwell imagined.

Which actor gave his final screen performance as the interrogator in the 1984 film of Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Richard Burton was not the first choice: he stepped in after Paul Scofield broke a leg. He died two months before the film opened, and it is dedicated to him.

Which future Hammer horror star played the hero in the BBC's 1954 Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Peter Cushing's torture scenes outraged MPs and parts of the press. The BBC performed the play live again four days later all the same, and drew its biggest audience since the Coronation.

Which David Bowie album began as songs for a Nineteen Eighty-Four musical?

Diamond Dogs took the songs after Orwell's widow refused permission for the stage show. A furious Bowie told a reporter she was 'the biggest upper-class snob I've ever met in my life'.

Which company's Super Bowl commercial in January 1984 promised that '1984 won't be like 1984'?

Apple hired Ridley Scott to film a runner hurling a hammer through a giant screen, as the launch of its Macintosh. The ad had only one national airing, during the Super Bowl.

Which band's 2003 single '2 + 2 = 5' takes its title from Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Radiohead put it on the album Hail to the Thief. In the novel the false sum is what the hero is tortured into accepting, the final proof that the Party alone decides what is true.

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four jumped in 2017 after a White House adviser used which phrase?

'Alternative facts' was Kellyanne Conway's phrase for false claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. Within days the novel was a number-one bestseller, and its publisher ordered 75,000 more copies.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which weekly event is the one thing the masses follow with serious attention?

The Lottery pays out only small sums. Its big prizes, the hero knows, are largely imaginary: the winners announced each week are people who do not exist.

Which reality TV format takes its name from Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Big Brother, the novel's all-seeing leader, lent his name to a show first aired on Dutch television in 1999. It turns the nightmare inside out: the housemates volunteer to be watched around the clock.

Which duo's songs were added to the 1984 film of Nineteen Eighty-Four against its director's wishes?

Eurythmics were hired by the film's backers at Virgin, who used their right of final cut to swap out much of the orchestral score. One of the songs, 'Sexcrime', became one of the duo's biggest hits.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dream voice promises the hero they will meet 'in the place where there is no' what?

Darkness: he takes the words for a promise of freedom. They turn out to describe a windowless prison where the lights are never switched off.

Which nursery rhyme do characters piece together line by line in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Oranges and Lemons comes back a line at a time as different characters recall it. At the lovers' arrest a hidden voice quotes its ending, about a chopper to chop off your head, as the Thought Police storm in.

Nineteen Eighty-Four opens in April with the clocks striking what?

Thirteen is the reader's first hint that something is wrong. Later the hero comes across an old-fashioned clock with a twelve-hour face in a junk shop, a relic of the vanished world.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is the usual word for people who are arrested at night and never seen again?

Vaporized is the usual word. There is no trial and no report of the arrest: the victim's name comes off every register, and his existence is denied and then forgotten.

On which Scottish island did Orwell draft and finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, at a farmhouse called Barnhill?

Jura was remote even for the Hebrides, and the farmhouse had no electricity or hot water. In 1947 Orwell nearly drowned there when his boat came to grief in the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Which author wrote to Orwell after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, arguing that rulers would rule by pleasure, not force?

Aldous Huxley had once taught the schoolboy Orwell French at Eton. His letter argued that rulers would find drugs and conditioning, as in his own Brave New World, more efficient than clubs and prisons.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was banned in the Soviet Union until which leader's time in power?

Gorbachev's policy of openness finally let Soviet magazines print the long-banned novel in the late 1980s. Until then, readers had relied on copies printed abroad and smuggled in.

Which company remotely deleted Nineteen Eighty-Four from its customers' e-readers in 2009?

Amazon had been selling an edition it had no rights to, so it wiped the book from customers' Kindles without warning and refunded them. Its chief executive later apologised and called the move 'stupid'.

What was the real name of George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Eric Blair took a pen name for his first book, in 1933, to spare his family embarrassment over his time living as a tramp. He is buried under his real name in an Oxfordshire churchyard.

Although Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in London, which currency do its characters spend in shops?

Dollars are the official money of the hero's whole superstate, which also takes in the Americas, and the pound sterling has been scrapped in its British province.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, how does the dark-haired girl first tell the hero that she loves him?

She slips him a note after a tumble in an empty hallway, and he makes himself wait at his desk before daring to unfold it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what in the lovers' rented room hides the device that gives them away?

A picture of a church covers the spot, and at the arrest it crashes to the floor after a cold voice behind it throws the lovers' own words back at them.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what does the interrogator hold up, using pain to make the hero miscount?

His fingers: he shows four and demands the answer five, and is not satisfied when the hero merely says it, because the hero must come to truly see five.

Faced with his worst fear in Nineteen Eighty-Four, what does the hero scream for his captors to do?

Torture his lover instead, he begs, and the threat is lifted at once: she was the one loyalty he had kept through months of pain.

When the lovers of Nineteen Eighty-Four meet by chance after release, how has their bond changed?

They are no longer in love: meeting in a park on a bitter March day, each admits betraying the other, and he lets her slip away among the passers-by.

Nineteen Eighty-Four's exiled arch-traitor, blamed for every setback, is modelled on which revolutionary?

Leon Trotsky is the model: both were senior revolutionaries who were cast out, and each is named as the author of a book attacking the regime he helped to build.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what does a rally speaker swap mid-sentence without the crowd objecting?

The nation being fought changes in the middle of his speech, and the crowd decides the posters naming the old foe are sabotage and rips them down.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, how does the hero's lover react when he reads the forbidden book to her?

She falls asleep, as she does when he tries to explain other serious matters: her revolt is about pleasure and getting by, not theory or the future.

As the hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four dates his first diary entry, which detail can he not be sure of?

The year is only his best guess: he reckons it from his own age, but with every document open to alteration no date can be checked any more.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what reason does the interrogator give for the Party's hunger to rule?

For its own sake, he says: when the hero suggests that the Party rules for the people's own good, the wrong guess earns him a jolt of pain.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is the name of the wife the hero once considered pushing into a quarry?

Katharine is still his legal wife: the Party allows no divorce, so the childless couple simply live apart, and he has not seen her in about a decade.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which ailment above the hero's ankle makes him climb the stairs slowly?

A varicose ulcer plagues him through the early chapters, then subsides, along with his cough, during the happy weeks of his secret affair.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what colour are the overalls that ordinary Party members such as the hero wear?

Blue overalls are the uniform of the rank and file, while the ruling Inner Party wears black, so a person's standing can be read at a glance.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which quirk of the hero's flat lets him write his diary without being watched?

A shallow alcove sits just outside the view of the screen on his wall, so he can write there unseen, though anything he says aloud can still be heard.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what name is given to the compulsory morning exercises the hero must do at home?

The Physical Jerks are led from the wall screen by an instructor who can see him too: a voice barks his name and number and tells him to bend lower.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, into which desk device does the hero dictate his rewritten news articles?

A speakwrite turns his spoken corrections into text, which is why putting pen to paper for a private diary feels so strange to him.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which war hero does the protagonist invent to fill a gap in an old news story?

Comrade Ogilvy never lived, yet once his exploits are in print he is as solid as any figure in the files; inventing him is the part of the job the hero enjoys most.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which scarce item does the hero lie about, claiming he has none left to share?

Razor blades are the shortage of the moment, so colleagues keep begging for one; he hoards two at home, and plans to use the hunt for them as an alibi.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which section of his ministry employs the hero to alter old news stories?

The Records Department keeps every file in step with the Party line, yet its clerks work in such isolation that he barely knows the people in the booths around him.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what did the hero once hold that proved three purged leaders' confessions false?

A press clipping showed the three men at a function in New York on the very date they had confessed to being on enemy soil; he destroyed it almost at once.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a street uproar the hero takes for a rising proves to be a scramble for what?

Cooking pans were in short supply, and a crowd of women was fighting over the few on sale: the shoddy things even broke apart in the scuffle.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a children's history textbook says every capitalist went about in which item?

A top hat and a long black coat were the capitalist's uniform, the schoolbook says; the hero copies the passage out, unable to tell how much of it is a lie.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, an old man in a pub grumbles that beer is no longer sold in which measure?

The pint has given way to the litre and the half-litre, and the barman serving the old man has no idea what the word even means.

The kindly shopkeeper who rents the lovers a room in Nineteen Eighty-Four turns out to serve which body?

The Thought Police planted him: at the arrest he walks in looking younger, taller and colder, the frail old dealer's manner gone.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, where do the lovers first meet alone, one Sunday afternoon?

A woodland clearing she had found earlier is the spot, and the hero is startled to find that the landscape around it matches one he keeps seeing in his sleep.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what name does the hero give the peaceful pasture that recurs in his dreams?

The Golden Country is an old pasture crossed by a footpath, and in the dream the dark-haired girl from work comes towards him across it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which drink does the hero first taste at an Inner Party official's flat?

Wine is brought in by the official's servant, a luxury neither the hero nor his lover has ever tasted, in a flat where the wall screen can be switched off.

Asked what they would do for the resistance in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which demand do the lovers refuse?

To separate forever is the one thing they will not do; moments earlier they had agreed to murder and even to suicide for the cause.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what pretext does an Inner Party official use to give the hero his address?

Lending a dictionary is the excuse: the official offers an advance copy of the newest edition, and the hero takes the scribbled address as a summons to the resistance.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, how does the forbidden book finally reach the hero during a week of rallies?

In a swapped briefcase: a stranger hands it over, pretending the hero dropped it, and the hero is then kept so busy at work that days pass before he can open it.

In the final pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a trumpet call announces a huge triumph on which front?

Africa is won in a single stroke, the bulletin claims, and news that would once have left the hero cold now moves him to tears.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what does the forbidden book reveal as the real purpose of the endless war?

To use up surplus goods: wealth shared out would leave the masses comfortable and harder to rule, so it is poured into weapons instead and everyone stays poor.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which invention does the hero's lover believe the Party gave the world?

The aeroplane was a Party invention, she was taught; the hero recalls planes from his own childhood, before the Party existed, and is disturbed by how little she minds.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which feature marks the leader who stares down from posters all over London?

A moustache, heavy and black, marks the poster leader, a likeness many readers link to Stalin; the novel never reveals whether the man really exists.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ministry where the hero works towers over London in the shape of what?

A white pyramid of glittering concrete, it climbs in terraces some 300 metres into the air and is said to hold 3,000 rooms above ground.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is the official business of the windowless Ministry of Love?

Law and order is its brief, which in practice means barbed wire, armed guards and torture: like its sister ministries, it is named for the opposite of what it does.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, where in England does the hero recall an atomic bomb falling in his childhood?

Colchester was hit in a brief atomic war in the 1950s, after which the great powers judged such bombs too dangerous for any of them to go on using.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what are the giant, almost unsinkable sea bases of the hero's superstate called?

Floating Fortresses are among the costly weapons the three superstates keep building for a war that none of them is ever able to win.

In the rented room of Nineteen Eighty-Four, what does the hero's lover put on that Party women never wear?

Make-up goes on while his back is turned, and scent with it; he guesses she slipped into a shop in the poor quarter for them, meaning to be a woman there and not a Party member.