A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
VERY age has produced one or two writers who let the falcons of their fancy prey at the future. But the future, though it moves like the heron slowly and With a doleful air, shares with that awkward bird a habit of finking unpredictably; and in recent times only Jules Verne has registered enough kills to warrant turning over more Fan one page in his game-book. George Orwell, who flew his ,UAwks into the infinity of fifty years ahead, might (I suspect) have been wryly gratified by the mixed reception accorded to the television production of ' 1984,' which is reviewed on a later page of this issue. The book was a direct attack on the principle of tyranny, an indirect attack on the means' now available to tyrants for exerting a kind of hypnosis over the Mind and will of the individual. The reactions of some at any rate of the individuals who saw Orwell's book dramatised on a method of mass-communication by a State monopoly bore out his prognosis of the possibilities in this field.
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