Name: George Orwell

Real name: Eric Blair

Age: 111, if he hadn't died in 1950, but he did.

Appearance: Friendly moustache

Look, I know who George Orwell was, OK? Went to Eton, became a socialist, pretended to be a tramp, wrote about poor people, fought against Franco in Spain, wrote Animal Farm satirising the USSR, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four warning against state tyranny, died of tuberculosis, became Britain's most revered postwar writer. Have I missed anything? No, that covers the basics. Although you forgot to mention that he wasn't very good.

What?! Yes he conspicuously cared about noble causes, yes he risked his life for them, yes he cleverly noticed that fascism and communism and poverty are bad, but as a writer … you know. He did his best, but I don't want to be unkind.

How dare you even imply whatever you're implying! It's not just me. Will Self dares too, and a bit more directly. Orwell, he says in an essay he has recorded for Radio 4, is England's "Supreme Mediocrity", a member of that group of people, in his assessment, "who unite great expertise and very little originality – let alone personality".

What possible basis could he have for saying this? Well mostly the basis of Orwell's prose style and his famous essay Politics and the English Language, which prescribes succinct and clear writing at all times and deplores anything that looks like showing off. In Self's view, this is not only flawed advice, but it amounts to just the kind of doctrinaire suppression of human variety and freedom that Orwell and his disciples claim to oppose.

Ooh. Get you with your doctrinaires! Exactly. Orwell would insist I say "inflexible" instead. Self himself of course deploys a famously recondite idiolect. His attack on Orwell contains "lucubration" and "fulguration", inter alia.

I have no idea what you just said, which makes me feel stupid and therefore dislike you. Yes. That's pretty much where Orwell's defenders come from. "Orwell says his aim was never to write anything that an intelligent normal working man couldn't understand," Professor Stephen Ingle told the Independent. "That's a golden rule he sticks to. I'd rather read Orwell than Will Self."

I might read both and ponder the matter. I don't suppose Self has a new book out? Why yes, it just so happens that he does!

Do say: Send Will Self to Room 101!

Don't say: He did it with Paul Merton in 2000. It was mediocre.