As global politics moves towards authoritarianism, not least in the US, the literary adjective “Orwellian” has experienced hyper-inflation in general usage, not just randomly in online postings but in a variety of media contexts and commentaries. An Irish US correspondent, reporting on the situation state-side for RTÉ radio, was recently unsure whether the present situation was to be described in terms of the Orwellian or the Kafkaesque. Like the Kafkaesque, what exactly can be deemed Orwellian is actually not that easy to nail down. The Orwellian is generally seen as a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)…

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