How is it that George Orwell is interpreted in such contradictory ways? “Legacy is not the best word to use to describe Orwell’s influence. He was a contradictory fellow: people read him in his own time in part because they didn’t know what he would think about an issue, and he often took positions against the conventional wisdom of even the political groups with which he was most closely allied. So it is impossible to know what Orwell would have said about anything. Yet people have been playing that game for fifty years.”