George Orwell's novel 1984 has had a good innings over the last few years: in addition to the runaway success of Endemol's Big Brother format and Reality TV in general, our current affairs are now dominated by a vocabulary that appears to come straight out of the more sinister pages of the book. As if in readiness for last year's centenary of the author's birth, evocatively named governmental agencies, catchy think tank and policy memes and global military campaigns have ensured that the fictional Ministry of Truth has been granted yet another lease of life in fact. The strategic mission of Orwell's Newspeak was the total colonisation of language and the imagination. But beyond the grandstanding of self-consciously political forms of language, unknown power lies in the cracks, whose furtive path betroths us to the dull yet brilliant magic of the everyday.

2003-11, ISSN 1356-7748-27