“It was a pleasure to burn.” Oops, sorry. Wrong book. That’s from Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s master work from the 1950s that predicts wall-sized TVs, iPods and the social alienation resulting from overuse of them, not to mention the indoctrination of state workers – in this case the Firemen paid not to put out fires but to start them and burn all books in the process.

Actually I should have kicked off this column with the opening lines of 1984, George Orwell’s horribly disturbing future of Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak and all kinds of other dystopian dysfunction that we now take for granted in modern society. Because, in a mind-boggling piece of irony, 1984 itself is the subject of a 1984-like piece of news.