Like many of us, George Orwell saw January as a month to be endured rather than enjoyed. You can picture him steeling himself against its cold, gloom, rain, frost and wind.

And not only because of his ailing, vulnerable body, which was ravaged for so many years by respiratory malfunction. But also because grimacing defiance is the posture January tends to bring out in people. Orwell wasn’t an exception. His attitude to January is soothingly familiar yet peculiarly his own.

At one point in Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), the protagonist Gordon Comstock meets his girlfriend Rosemary under some railway arches on “a horrible January night”. There’s “a vile wind” that screeches round corners and flings dust and torn paper into their faces.

In Animal Farm (1945), January’s “bitterly hard weather” makes the earth “like iron” and stops the creatures from working in the fields.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) transposes these imagined Januaries to other points on the calendar. It begins on a “bright cold day in April”.

As in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a “vile wind” whirls dust and scraps of paper into the air. The sameness between the books isn’t mere repetition. On the contrary, I think that it subtly evidences January’s tenacious impact on Orwell’s........

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