Churchill, Orwell and “1984”
It’s the 50th anniversary of George Orwell’s prescient masterpiece 1984, to which end The Sunday Times published a review by Robert Harris on May 31st.
But in praising 1984, Harris finds the need to take a whack at Churchill—which he does with singular inaccuracy: “Given that only five years previously Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had divided up the world into ‘zones of influence’ at the Teheran conference, [Orwell’s] vision did not seem entirely fantastic.”
What is fantastic is where people get such notions. “Zones of influence” came up not at Teheran but at the Moscow (“Tolstoy”) conference between Churchill and Stalin a year later, with the Red Army now far advanced in eastern Europe.…
