On the shoulders of a giant: George Orwell

Voice of (many) generations

It is highly likely that if you want to describe an oppressive political regime, you'll use the word Orwellian; likewise, big brother will spring to mind whenever your conversation or thoughts take you to issues concerning rogue states and/or organisations that exercise a rigid control on people. These are only two examples-thought police could be another one- that have become part of our daily language whose origin take us back to the influential and visionary novelist and journalist George Orwell (real name Eric Blair).
A series of  radio programmes  to be broadcast  by the BBC Radio 4 over the following days ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pyz0z) is the perfect excuse to delve into the work of this most formidable Englishman; it is also a reminder of how influential Orwell remains today, not only because some of those most perverse and bleakest premonitions he'd imagined in his fiction novels have today become real  but also because some of his less well-known journalistic pieces illustrated readers about  a range of key issues of the time: imperialism, totalitarianism, social justice...
Orwell's accounts of his different experiences -and he had a few- make him, in my and many others' opinion, a master of political and social journalism, a true craftsman, an example of how to tell the tale in a way that is direct yet deeply touching without being pretentious; and that isn't always easy to achieve.
 If that wasn't enough to justify his status,  here's another example: he once again was spot on when in his masterpiece 1984, he wrote this chilling message: ' Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past'. Frightening.