A lot can happen in thirty-five years. Thirty-five years before the novel’s publication was the glorious summer of 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was still alive, Orwell was about to turn eleven, and death camps and atom bombs were science fiction. One of the novel’s dark jokes is that it may not even be 1984. When Winston comes to write his diary, he realises he isn’t sure, because “it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.” So the very first line he writes may be untrue. Orwell is telling the reader early on that this is a book in which you can trust nobody
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Very impactful sentence
