It was the British political journalist Jason Cowley, writing in London’s Sunday Times a month or two back, who posed a query calculated to strike terror into the heart of any self-respecting Orwell-fancier. Were we, Cowley wondered, with the air of one who tosses a Sèvres vase into the air to watch it descend into heap of fragments, approaching peak Orwell? Was the man in whose voluminous output so much of modern political and sociocultural malaise has been refracted losing his sheen?

Some Orwellians – myself included – on hearing this would probably respond with a rather handy Latin phrase: si monumentem requiris, circumspice, which loosely translates as, “If you want evidence, buster, then take a look around.” Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2 2=5 has just opened in cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic; Andy Serkis’s animated version of Animal Farm is due on the big screen in early May.

On the other hand, it could be argued that each of these artefacts is in some degree a symptom of peak Orwell, redolent of an industry that has got calamitously out of hand. The Peck documentary, for example, is politically charged and wears its anti-Trump credentials like a Miami Dolphins hoodie. The Serkis film, which is narrated by a cadre of leading American actors (Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi) is an Animal Farm refitted to suit modern mores, which is to say that it has acquired several extra characters; seen Snowball, the boar usually associated with Trotsky, transformed into a sow; and is being marketed as a “coming-of-age” drama featuring an ideologically conflicted piglet named Lucky.

To move on to the world of the modern-day ideologue (that raptly contested space in which Orwell would doubtless have taken a keen interest): what garment did Elon Musk happen to be wearing when he addressed the crowd, via video link, at a far-right London protest last September? A T-shirt bearing the slogan “What would Orwell think?” Anti-Trump documentaries, feel-good reimaginings of totalitarian satires, Musk invoking the spirit of a man who spent his life attacking… well, people like Musk – this is what life on Planet Orwell currently consists of.

Trump has given America back its heroes

Who is actually talking to the Iranians?

Last waltz for Trump’s Hungarian friends?

Cowley’s question turns out to be one in which the abundant crop of Orwell books can hardly fail to engage. A representative specimen might be George Orwell: Life........

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