In 1904 G.K. Chesterton wrote a fantasy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. It was, by coincidence, set in 1984, but had no resemblance to George Orwell’s terror-dominated police state of Nineteen Eighty Four. The year was not actually important: it was simply set in the distant but not too-distant future. Nor did it resemble the other great dystopia, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the great nanny-state in which the masses were bred by a small elite for low intelligence and drugged by …
