George Orwell wrote 1984 from a particularly remote part of a remote Scottish island. Beautiful though it is, Jura is an unfortunate place to be dying of tuberculosis. But Orwell was too committed to waste time with doctors: instead he struggled through a 125,000-word hand-written manuscript as his symptoms worsened. Then came the typing. When it proved tricky luring a stenographer to work with a consumptive patient in a desolate farmhouse, Orwell again took on the task himself.