The Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth is the best book I have read in a long time. Fizzing with ideas yet superbly readable, it takes us though Orwell’s life and the development of twentieth-century utopias and dystopias, to the long afterlife of Orwell’s greatest work, read and misread during the Cold War as simple anti-communist propaganda, then in the 1980s as a failed prophecy, before finally and frighteningly showing it as a warning for our own age. When today 1984 is scrubbed from the internet in China, Russia weaponises lies on social media, and in the West a Trump adviser talks of “alternative facts” on his Inauguration Day, Lynskey’s book is both a warning and an exhortation for us all to be stubborn as Orwell was with facts, and like Winston Smith to cling to the belief that 2+2=4. – C. J. Sansom
Fascinating … Freshly and powerfully argued … If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book. – John Carey, The Sunday Times
Everything you wanted to know about 1984 but were too busy misusing the word -Orwellian- to ask. – Caitlin Moran

Dorian Lynskey has been writing about music, film and politics for over 20 years for a huge number of titles, from the Guardian to Rolling Stone. His first book, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History Of Protest Song, was published in the UK by Faber & Faber and by Ecco/HarperCollins in the States.

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