For a long time I foolishly scorned George Orwell. I think the prejudice is common among people of my generation (well among people of my generation who care about such things). Orwell is viewed as a fetish of boomer columnists – the types of people who sit in their houses in Hampstead being paid six figures by broadsheet newspapers not really trying with their prose and fondly imagining they are working in plain Orwellian sentences and fearlessly speaking truth to power."