They’re both fascinating writers but why focus on George Orwell and Franz Kafka in particular?
This year marks 75 years since the publication of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the centenary of Kafka’s death. The thing that connects them, of course, is the fact that both of them gave us adjectives. That’s our way in: what does it mean to describe something as Orwellian or Kafkaesque?
We start with Ian Hislop talking to Alan Bates about whether his ordeal over the Horizon computer system failure [at the Post Office] was Orwellian or Kafkaesque. The case went through the courts in this labyrinthine, Kafkaesque way, but it was also Orwellian as some of the postmasters and postmistresses were threatened.
How true are these adjectives to how both would have seen their own work?