Reading the hugely popular novel, it struck me that Orwell had gotten a lot of inspiration from world war II but also the communist USSR. What threats, politically, historically, or economically were posed to the general British citizen at its time?
"The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."