At school, we spent quite some time studying George Orwell’s 1984. He was a popular talking point in that era of the early 60’s. We had many debates and discussion about him and his work. I didn’t really fully understand it then, but of course such ideas became clearer over time.
These days it’s quite difficult to engage anyone in a decent conversation about what he wrote, and if one does bring it up one gets called all sorts of names.