Glavin: A toast to George Orwell – who never intended to be a prophet

It is the most unlikely place for such a profoundly influential treatise on totalitarianism to have been written, and odd, too, that the 20th century’s most harrowing and vivid account of life in the soul-crushing dystopia of a police state was a novel. But George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published 70 years ago this month, was composed in a remote deerstalker’s redoubt on the Scottish island of Jura, under skies alive with gannets and guillemots and the occasional eagle,