always afraid that O'Brien knows his thoughts or might have implanted them in a way so they have this strangely telepathic relationship you know from the start and O'Brien says we've been watching you for seven years which is one of the mysteries in the book why is Winston so important that they spend all that effort on him it's not at all clear unless he is the last man as it were the last one with a vested judge unless they just say that to everybody

maybe he's not that important but they they want him to think he is you know that's all part of the paranoia I mean all these questions that such a sort of slippery book in some ways and what was writing often is like this he often has these sort of strange narrators that are watching him as Orwell who's also a kind of character and so on and I think one of the things that's really important about 1984 is that it proves you know beyond any shadow of a doubt that literature can do things that other kinds of writing can't do other kinds of discourse can't do because it can be ambiguous it can be troubling it can get inside your head it can make you feel things and make you understand things in a different way in an almost instinctive way that in after 1984 was written no one can ever say that there's no point writing a novel about politics because Orwell's nailed it and it's also really important that the that the kind of a notion of the aesthetic is so important in this book of course there's the experience of reading you've said how visceral it is how everything smells nearly everyone is ugly and there is this recoil from this world on an aesthetic level but there's also this kind of belief in the aesthetic embodied by the Karl paperweight in a way that's a kind of symbol of what can art can do because in this world everything has been reduced to instrumental value the only value that intrinsic value might say is power that's the only end in itself but the coral is glorious because absolutely useless in a way that decro exactly and this piece of junk is one of the most valuable things in it but largely because it serves no purpose and that's a traditional way that the aesthetic has been talked about and it's mimicked by the thrush that he hears in his in his dream and after Julian he make love the thrush is singing for itself and for nobody else and that sense of being of of a good that's entirely sufficient to itself is what the aesthetic itself embodies and it's a way out of the brutally instrumentalist world where the only value is power in itself. He holds onto it for dear life but in the end when at the moment of his arrest it gets smashed and he sees the little piece of coral that was magnified by the glass of paperweight look all on the floor and be crushed and he says how small it always was how small there's something

terribly poignant about that moment sort of going completely against our own rules but how relevant do you think it is to today?