Orwell feared what he most desired: the future. But it is easy to gloat over Orwell's contradictions--to point out that he wrote so well about the drabness and horror of totalitarianism because he himself had a tendency to drab omnipotence; or that the great proponent of urban collectivity liked rural isolation [...]; or more simply, that the hater of private schools put his adopted son down for Westminster, one of the grandest london academies. So Orwell was contradictory: contradictions are what make writers interesting; consistency is for cooking. Instead, one is gratefully struck by how prescient Orwell was, by how much he got right. [...]