The name that comes most readily to mind in a consideration of the state and the novel is George Orwell. His two most famous political fables, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), have proved hugely significant in the post-war world, influencing many subsequent literary dystopias, and also supplementing our use of language. Terms like ‘Big Brother’, ‘doublethink’ and ‘unperson’ from Nineteen Eighty-Four have become part of the contemporary political lexicon. It is also possible to see the cautionary note of these novels as establishing a liberal world-view, based on a deep scepticism of political extremes that helps fashion ‘a new lineage of liberal and socially attentive writing’ that is dominant in British fiction in the 1950s and beyond.

The mood of Orwell's fables, however, might now seem backward-rather than forward-looking in some respects. At the level of prophecy, it is true, the repudiation of the corrupt mechanics of the communist state implicit in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four chimes with the Cold War mood, which is dominant in Western society through into the 1980s. But in terms of gestation, both works have an eye to the past, and particularly to Orwell's disillusioning experiences fighting for the revolutionary POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia in the Spanish Civil War. The immediate resonance of both books in Britain, moreover, was dependent upon the post-war experience of austerity, where shortages, rationing, and government control and bureaucracy made (in particular) the confinement of ‘Airstrip One’, Orwell's depiction of London in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seem a faintly plausible extension of reality.