Alternative facts, fake news and how George Orwell saw #DonaldTrump's rise ...

trumpTrump delivers his inaugural speech (Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In December 1948, a man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote Scottish island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man. In January 2017, another man stands before a crowd, which is not as large as he would like, in Washington, DC, taking the oath of office as the 45th President of the United States of America.

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Donald Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer later claims it was the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration - period". Asked to justify such a preposterous lie, the president's adviser Kellyanne Conway describes the statement as "alternative facts".

Over the next four days, sales of the dead man's book will rocket by almost 10,000 percent in America, making it a number one bestseller again 68 years after its first publication.

That book is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the fact that it speaks to us so loudly and clearly in 2019 is a terrible indictment.

When it was published in the United Kingdom on June 8, 1949 - in the middle of a century defined by democracy's struggle to overcome totalitarian regimes - one critic wondered how it could possibly exert the same power over generations to come.

Thirty-five years later, when the present caught up with Orwell's future and the real 1984 was not the nightmare he described, it was again predicted that the novel's popularity would wane.

Another 35 years have elapsed since then, yet Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted and power is abused.

It has not just sold tens of millions of copies, it has infiltrated the consciousness of countless people, including those who have never read it. Orwell's phrases and concepts have become fixtures of our language: Newspeak, Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, the Two Minutes Hate, doublethink, unperson, 2 + 2 = 5, and the Ministry of Truth The very word Orwellian has turned the author's own name into a synonym for everything he hated and feared.

conwayTrump's adviser Kellyanne Conway (Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

No work of literary fiction from the past century approaches its cultural ubiquity while retaining its weight.

I first encountered Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager in suburban south London. As Orwell said, the books you read when you're young stay with you for ever.

I found it shocking and compelling, but this was circa 1990, when communism and apartheid were on the way out, optimism reigned, and the world didn't feel particularly Orwellian.

Even after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, the book's relevance was fragmentary. Democracy was on the rise and the internet was still largely considered a force for good.

Yet during Trump's campaign against Hillary Clinton, it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of "Lock her up!" without being reminded of the Two Minutes Hate.

It is truly Orwellian that the phrase "fake news" has been turned on its head by Trump and his ilk to describe real news that is not to their liking, while flagrant lies become "alternative facts".

There is no doubt that this year's 70th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four falls at a dark time for liberal democracy.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was the first fully realised dystopian novel to be written in the knowledge that dystopia was real.

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In Germany and the Soviet bloc, men had built it and forced other men and women to live and die within its iron walls.

Those regimes may be gone, but Orwell's book continues to define our nightmares, even as they shift and change.

At some point he sketched out the blueprint for Nineteen

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