Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker & Warburg on June 8, 1949. In Blackpool, the Labour Party held its annual conference. In Paris, foreign ministers were deadlocked over the future of Germany. In Washington, President Truman reaffirmed US support for South Korea. That morning’s edition of the London Times carried a front-page report of a press conference by General Jan Smuts, the former prime minister of South Africa and a prominent supporter of the United Nations: “Mankind was living in a spiritual twilight, and none knew whether dawn or dusk would follow.”
