1984

And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?

But some experts are less sanguine, and questions persist about the safety of using X-ray machines on such a large scale. New York Times (Aug 7, 2012)

For certain, Magic lost respect in the eyes of many by living such a promiscuous lifestyle.

A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.

The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall.

"He knows you," Mademoiselle repeated in a tone almost apathetic. Weyman, Stanley J.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Intriguingly, Darwin’s mother’s family was a sickly lot. Slate (Jul 26, 2012)

Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor.

To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.

A small space created by building part of a wall further back from the rest

He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it.

Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off.

Spend time vividly imagining exactly how wrong things could go in reality, and you'll often turn bottomless, nebulous fears into finite and manageable ones.

A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.

O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face.

He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique.

All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently espicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched.

The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.

Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him.

It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon.

He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold.

In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

Here are some photographs: an airplane lavatory, some women in bikinis on a beach.

His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals

He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl: