Backlisted - The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

For the second of three episodes recorded at the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall, John and Andy are joined by songwriter and activist Billy Bragg and journalist and critic Suzi Feay to talk about George Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. This special episode features audience participation on a scale never before heard on Backlisted - make sure you keep listening until the very end of the Q&A session...Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)0'00 - The Lion and The Unicorn by George Orwell* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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More details at aircanada.com. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We're here today, huddled in the ruins of a once great civilisation, warming ourselves across the dying embers of the fire that was once the Port Elliot Festival. The dreams of glad, confident, sunny mornings, gone. But we don't need sunny mornings for stories and ideas, do we? No! Thank you. I'm John Mitchinson, I'm the publisher of Unbound.

My name's Andy Miller, I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And we're very pleased to be joined on Batlisted today to talk about The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell. Two guests. Our first guest is Susie Fay. Round of applause. That was spontaneous, wasn't it? Yeah.

This crowd is a hot crowd. Thank you very much. Moist but hot. Susie Fay is an arts journalist, former literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. She's currently the TV and radio critic for the FT. She's associate editor of the London Magazine, a member of the Authors Club,

and head of the Critics Circle books section. So she knows about books. She is an expert of the sort you, the public, no longer like. Susie, what is the best thing you've seen at the festival so far this year? Everything has been fantastic. I shall mention two things briefly. I went to see a talk on Alexander McQueen. Brilliant talk. Daphne Guinness, his muse was there and she had the single most unsuitable set of footwear for a festival I have ever seen. Possibly not suitable for walking in at all and I waited to the end to make sure she could actually get up and totter out. Platforms without heels but

not wedges. Can't describe it. And then the other thing I went to see, which was just so Port Elliot, did anybody go and see the musical version of Crow in the church? I mean, it was mesmerising. It was bonkers. It was baffling. Ted Hughes' poem. Ted Hughes' somebody intoning and singing and weird music. It was a premiere. You'll only see it at a festival like this, I'm sure.

And when I came out, somebody went, I thought that was a premiere. You'll only see it at a festival like this, I'm sure. And when I came out, somebody went, I thought that was a hoax. Just fantastic. We're also joined by Billy Bragg. Billy Bragg is a singer, songwriter and activist, inspired by punk and politicised by the conservatism of Margaret Thatcher's government, and especially the 1984 miners' strike. He has released 13 studio albums and written books on Englishness, lyric writing,

and most recently, Skiffle, who was here yesterday for his talk with Will Hodgkinson. Wasn't it brilliant? It was brilliant. Also, on a personal note, I would just like to say, when I told people that Billy was sharing the stage with us today, a friend of mine who's sitting in that row there said,

"'Make sure you send a text to your 15 year old self.'" I've probably seen Billy live in performance more than I've ever seen any other artist. I reckon about, well, from Hammersmith in about 1984 through to Blastonbury a couple of years ago, about 30 times. Crying. You're technically a sad-o, mate.

Congratulations. Technically. You can join this. I'm thrilled that Billy could come here today and join us to talk about The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell. Can I just get a quick show of hands, how many people have read The Lion and the Unicorn? Yeah. Interesting. It's very interesting.

It's not that many, right? No, it's very obscure. I'd say about 5% of the crowd here. So Billy, when did you first encounter this book? Well, you mentioned in your introduction, you mentioned the 1984 miners' strike. That was kind of like my political education. I really didn't know a huge amount about socialism before I went in. My politics were broadly what you would call humanitarianism.

I'd been politicised by Rock Against Racism. But I didn't really know much about Marxism or any of the technical aspects of ideology. And the things that were to hand to try and find those out, which were things like the socialist worker newspaper,

everything seemed to be focused on something that happened in Petrograd in 1917. It didn't really seem to have any resonance with what had happened in my lifetime. You know, the welfare state. I thought we were defending, you know, the welfare state, public provision of education, of health care, of decent affordable housing.

Yeah. So I was looking for something to connect with. And this edition of The Lion and the Unicorn, which was the first time it was published since the war, as a standalone edition, came out in 1982. And there was within Red Wedge, particularly with Paul Weller, there was an interest in Orwell, mostly for his dress sense with Paul, obviously,

but for the rest of us. There was something about the subtitle of the Lion and the Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius. And this is used in genius in its original term, as it's in genius loci, to mean the sort of the thing about the English that in some way defines them as a character. What connection does socialism have to that? From my background, that seemed to me to be a very interesting way of trying to get my head around what socialism meant in England in 1984, 1985.

Obviously, Orwell is writing about 1940, 1941. So I started reading it, and I have to say, it's probably been the most influential book on my thinking. It's the book I'd give people and say, you really, really should read this. You mentioned my book, The Progressive Patriot, which I wrote in 2006 after the British National Party won 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham Council,

which is my hometown. It was the lion and the unicorn I turned to to try and write something that took that same position to explain why I, a person of the left, feel patriotic about my town and my country, about belonging. I think really Orwell's book really is about belonging. I think it is undoubtedly the best thing that's ever been written about patriotism from a leftist perspective.

Good news, everyone. It's for sale in the bookshop. Thanks, Bill. Susie, slight different question for you. When we did that show of hands earlier, basically everybody, literally everyone in this tent, bar one or two people, has read something by George Orwell or knows who George Orwell is.

He's so ingrained in English cultural life, regardless of your political affiliations, I think. Can you remember when you first came across, remember reading about Orwell or something by Orwell? Well, I think at school we had read Animal Farm fairly early on, and as often happens with Animal Farm, I mean, that's the thing about school. You read things that are brilliant, but you're far too young to take them in. So I was aware of him then, but I think the thing that changed my whole worldview was reading 1984 as a teenager in Africa babysitting. So I was looking after somebody else's kids, looking around for something to read, took 1984 off of their bookshelf and began to read it.

And I think I read it all in one sitting till the early hours because people partied quite a lot in Africa. They were probably all at the golf club with my parents. And I felt as if someone had ripped the top of my head off and scooped out quite a lot of my brains and put new stuff in. And it was a horrifying, in many ways, experience. I kind of rebelled against the book. One of the things, and again, I might as well, I was probably misreading it,

but I wanted to rebel against what I saw he was saying or what I thought he was saying about human nature as a kind of romantic. So I had a long, dark night of the soul, aged about 15, in Africa. I just want to place, before we place the book, I just want to give an overview of Orwell's career very, very quickly, which is we think of Orwell now as perhaps a writer who was always famous because he's so famous now and so influential. In fact, that's not true. He would be best described until about five years before he died

as a failed novelist. He had written a series of novels which hadn't sold well. He'd written a book called The Road to Wigan Pier, which we see as a very famous and important book. That had done OK. When he publishes The Lion and the Unicorn in the early years of the Second World War, that is his most commercially successful book,

even though it was then out of print and could not be bought for about 40 years. It was a pamphlet, wasn't it? It was basically a pamphlet. It's short, can be read very quickly. What then happens to Orwell is after the war, he writes a book called Animal Farm, which becomes an international bestseller

because Americans don't understand it. It's true. They read it about the Soviet Union. It's not about the Soviet Union. So then he thinks to himself, I know what I'll do. I'll write 1984. That becomes a massive bestseller around the world because Americans don't understand it.

Because people read it as a prediction of the future. It's not a prediction of the future. It is about the here and now or the there and then. And then he dies. And he would be astonished to think that he would be remembered in this way and that we would be talking about this particular book at this moment. Bill, what is it about Orwell's prose that grabs people? I think when you talk about Animal Farm and you talk about 1984,

I think, you know, I must have read 1984 five times. Just when I got my first job, I remember reading it. It seemed to me about the world that I was entering, the world of work, this regimented place that I was in. But every time I read it, it seems to be about something else. I mean, my most recent reading of it, it's about fake news.

You know, when Winston's sitting there burning the stories and putting them into the fire and putting in new stories. Before I thought, in the new Labour years, I thought it was about spin. I didn't realise we were going to end up in this kind of place. So it's the ability to read into it the moment that you're in is really, really a very, very powerful piece of writing that Orwell's put

in there. And the same with Animal Farmers. All great fables are like that. Animal Farmers are a fable. And all great fables go through time. That's why we still love Aesop. But 1984, in some ways, is a fable as well. And to think it's about totalitarianism, I think it is close to what you were saying. So about being about human nature. Because fake news, unfortunately, is about human nature. There's this famous phrase of Orwell's that he wanted to write, good prose should be transparent like a window pane. So is that one of the things that you think people respond to in Orwell? That it has this particular kind of clarity

of expression? You're never confused when you're reading Orwell I think. Well it might be one very simple reason for his international fame, because if you write like that, you're very easy to translate. You know? And if you write like James Joyce, it takes 40 years or whatever for the Japanese edition to come out. But that is what is very clear with everything that he writes, and there's something to do with the person that he thinks he is addressing, I think, so it must not be

highfalutin, it must not be grandiose, there mustn't be Latin tags, there mustn't be references, you know, references that are too esoteric. I mean, he's just an immensely brilliant phrase maker, isn't he? Just that England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege ruled largely by the old and the silly. How far we've come. Yes. More of that later. So I'm going to ask Bill to read a bit from the book in a moment. We do a thing on Batlisted where we like to read the, because we're publishing folk and book selling folk, and we like to read the blurb on the book, the jacket copy, to see whether we think it's effective.

Does it communicate what the book's about? Is it going to sell any copies? The blurb for The Lion and the Unicorn was written by George Orwell. So this is what Orwell wanted you to think the book was about. It's a short description, but it will also set the book up for you if you haven't read it. This original book is a short description, but it will also set the book up for you if you haven't read it. This original book is a study of England and of England's special problems in an age when private capitalism is dissolving into a classless, ownerless society. Cutting across the ordinary

classifications, the book insists that England, like all great countries, has its own peculiar destiny, and that the imitation of foreign political methods and habits of thought has been a disastrous error. Against the conventional patriots, it urges the impossibility of winning the war without far-reaching social reconstruction. Against the conventional left-wingers, it urges the uselessness of aiming at any version of socialism that does not take account of English history and character. It sets out in its own words to reconcile patriotism with intelligence. The first part of the book is a study of the social atmosphere of England and an attempt to determine just how much reality and how much humbug British democracy contains. The second part emphasises the disastrous effects of social injustice

on a nation engaged in total war. The third part sets forth a simple concrete policy of a kind that the English people might be induced to follow. This is a book for those who are neither ashamed of being Englishmen nor satisfied with England as it now is. We should all rise to our feet as one. And sing Jerusalem.

And sing Jerusalem. Now, there are no recordings, as we were discussing earlier, of the voice of George Orwell. But Bill is going to... No, he's not. Bill is going to give voice. What I will say is one of the reasons why I wrote my Skiffle book is that when I used to talk about Skiffle to audiences

when I was doing gigs, we used to do a version of The Stone's Dead Flowers and I would say, you know, this is what Skiffle was all about, Americana, you know, we invented Americana. When I would talk about Lonnie Donegan's name, people in the audience, a few people would snigger in the way they just sniggered

when you read the idea that you could mix patriotism with intelligence. What Orwell says in this book about patriotism, I'm afraid, is something that I've always, it's always annoyed me, partly because it's so true. And maybe it's true of this festival, maybe it's true of this audience. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that is a duty to snigger at every English institution, as we just heard a second ago. That from horse racing to suet puddings, it's a strange fact, but it's unquestionably true

that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the Queen than of stealing from a poor box. And, you know, I think that, unfortunately, that is still true in our country. People get patriotism completely the wrong way around you know when johnson said uh patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel that was a comment on scoundrels not on patriotism and if you can't love your country in in all its

glory and all its you know tardiness how can you love the rest of humanity? You've got to start somewhere. And I think that what Orwell was trying to do in this book is to reconcile his own ideas as someone, as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who went to Spain and fought with the PUM, you know, fought with Marxist anarchists. Now, can he come back to this country as an internationalist who's gone over there and, you know, although he wasn't in the international brigade, he's gone over there. Can he now find it in his heart to make the case for defending Britain, standing next to Churchill? Can he make that case? And I think it's that struggle where he tries to find in England something that he genuinely loves,

is what gives the book its edge. And it does have a lot of edge. I mean, the opening line, I mean, Orwell was so great at opening lines. We all know about the clock striking 13. But the opening line for this book is, as I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. You know, he's writing at the height of the Blitz. He's writing after the fall of France. He's writing before the invasion of the Soviet Union. He's writing

before the United States of America came into the war. If ever there was a time when our country was under threat of destruction, it was this moment when it all sat down to try and, in this little book, distill what it is that is worth fighting for. And I think it's still there. I think it's still here now in our country. And I think it's something that... It wouldn't be a bad thing if we kind of grasped it and recognised it in a time when external influences

are trying to mess with our electoral process, with our day-to-day discourse. A little bit of patriotism would go a long way. And patriotism is like socialism. Anyone who is a socialist will know there are many, many varieties of socialism. Well, there are many varieties of patriotism too. I think of myself as a patriot. And it's those belligerent patriots who do disrespect to our flag and our country that we need to be fighting. As a patriot, I'm no longer willing to watch the flag of my country be used to intimidate my neighbours.

That, to me, is patriotism. So, you know, that's what all we're trying to get to. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a... Yeah. Thank you. I just want to read... This is, like, three lines. Three lines? Oh, that as well. The three lines and all, don't forget, and Gareth Southgate.

Yeah. Sorry, I've totally forgotten that bit. Sing it, Andy, sing it. You don't know the words. You don't know the words. No, I draw the line somewhere. All else coming home. Yeah. No, I draw the line somewhere. Orwell's coming home.

Yeah. So this is like three or four lines. We were talking about this earlier. This is from a book that Orwell wrote called The English People. And he wrote this about the same kind of time that he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn. And it's an attempt to define what patriotism is for English people, what they like and what they don't like, how they should express it. And Susie will talk a bit about this,

about some of the techniques that he uses to do this. But I thought this seemed very relevant. This really stood out to me when I read it. The English will never develop into a nation of philosophers. They will always prefer instinct to logic and character to intelligence. But they must get rid of their downright contempt for cleverness. They cannot afford it any longer. They must grow less tolerant of ugliness and mentally more adventurous.

And they must stop despising foreigners. They are Europeans and ought to be aware of it. It's all right, I mentioned Brexit, I don't think anyone noticed. I don't think anyone noticed. The sharp, smart, online menswear company, Spoke designed men's trousers and now shorts and polo shirts for the difference. They fit you, not the other way around. With their online fit finder, just enter a few simple details and in under a minute you'll have the perfect fit. You can choose from almost 200 size combinations. Spoke obsess over every detail of their clothing. The fabric, the lining, the fastenings,

and ordering from Spoke is not like going to a tailor. It's no hassle, no expense. You get sharp, personalized design delivered in just two working days. And as a backlisted listener, if you go to www.spoke-london.com and place an order. You'll get £20 off your first order. Just use the code backlisted20. Terms and conditions apply. Unfortunately, Orwell's taste in trousers is one of the very few things he didn't commit to writing about in any of his essays. But I'm pretty sure if Orwell had worn trousers, they would be very likely to be a kind of loose, lovely, well-fitting trousers that Spoke produce. Now, back to the tent. Susie, now what he's doing there is really interesting.

Orwell is king of what I would describe as the value judgment. So the prose is moving pretty quickly. And he'll say something like, there's a brilliant one, he says, unquestionably, we all know that. And he's gone, he's gone, he's on to the next thing. And you're, oh, you know, did you find that when you were revisiting this? Well, we have to remember that he was a journalist

and as you've said, he was probably more known as a journalist at the time. He wrote book reviews and he is a master in this form that I'm not sure we do in the quite same way now with the essay form. And so he is nimbly springing from subject to subject. And he is meant to awaken in us that critical faculty of, yes, absolutely. No, not sure about that.

I'll come back to you on that. Oh, absolutely. You know, to go back to the pane of glass image, I think what he'd say is what you do with a pane of glass is you look through it, you don't look at it. So in a way, his style is aiming to get the urgent matter that he's trying, you know, he's trying to get that into us. And one of the things I was thinking reading this stuff, I'm just thinking about journalism today, which I teach. this stuff. I'm just thinking about journalism today, which I teach. I think we're in a very safe area now where people don't want to say too much, push too much, be too contentious. And I was thinking about this in my role as a radio critic. I was listening to a programme with a female comic saying about an essay that Christopher Hitchens, Saint Christopher Hitchens wrote,

Why Women Aren't Funny. It's something like, why aren't women funny? And there was a lot of thinking of this programme about it's disgraceful, this, you know, as if it's the most offensive thing imaginable. And I then thought I would read this essay. And, you know, it actually says, yes, there are female comedians and they're very good. There are funny women. He's making broader points. But I think now we're so quick to say that's offensive to me. Shut that down.

He shouldn't have said that. And Orwell, I mean, I'd be so fascinated to see how Orwell would thrive and survive in our intellectual milieu of the moment where these sorts of contentious statements are seen as a provocation and not as

an incitement to debate. John? That's interesting because I often notice that with articles. You read a really kind of click bait-y headline and then you it's got nothing really to do with what... It's the sort of subs or whoever else chooses them. The writers don't write the headlines.

The writers don't write the headlines. It's interesting. I mean, one of the things I love about particularly this essay, but all generally, he's got that amazing kind of focus-full thing. He can give you... I mean, one of the things that's remarkable, I think, about this book is he does lay down a six-point plan for a revolution. There's a sort of painfulness in it as well, because you can sort of see that the 1945 Labour landslide and

the Reconstruction did about 70% of what he recommends, but crucially, other things didn't happen. He's very, very straightforward. You cannot have class privilege. If you want to get rid of class privilege, you cannot have private education. Bang. And he hits you with all these points. And then he goes, but here is another point worth noting, a minor English trait, which is extremely well marked, though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really,

because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feeling whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic, which is so much part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower lovers, but also a nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, crossword puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres around things

which, even when they are communal, are not official. The pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and a nice cup of tea. A nice cup of tea, yeah. But if you were to ask people, you know, internationally what Englishness is, wouldn't they say Downton Abbey, mostly? They would say the very thing, you know, public schools,

Eton, cricket, you know, public schools, Eton, crickets, you know, isn't that a part of patriotism? This is one of the things about Orwell that I think is fascinating. He's rebranding England, I think, in this essay. That's what he's trying to do. But also the way that Orwell, nearly 70 years after his death, has been, can be co-opted by people of radically different political persuasions, Bill, right? So the

famous line near the beginning of this essay about, and some of you of a certain age will remember this, the famous image of old maids bicycling to communion through the morning mist was appropriated by John Major in a speech in the early 1990s that the right see no disjoint in Orwell as a thinker, even though... Yeah, but Orwell has words for them. He says here, patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is actually the opposite of conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing,

yet is felt to be mystically the same. The bridge between the future and the past, no real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist. So, you know... How do you feel about that? I mean, I think this book contains the best summation of what it is about a country. It doesn't only have to be England,

but he manages to evoke something in this metaphor that I think is so true about the nature of belonging and time and patriotism. He says, remember he's writing in 1940, he says, what can England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing except that you happen to be the same person. Oh, it's brilliant. And in that, he somehow grasps the way that countries change, yet instinctively remain the same.

My dog passed away, but when I used to walk my dog, I used to walk him up the top of the hill past a burial mound that's been there since the Bronze Age. Now, that burial mound isn't in the Bronze Age. Now that burial mound isn't in the Bronze Age. It's in my day. I still walk by it and it's still part of my landscape. And that, whoever those people put that thing there is probably maybe even ethnically different to me. We still have a connection there. And I think if we're going to find from the left a connection, it's got to be rooted, as you mentioned at the very beginning, Andy, in the

history in our country, the history of dissent. Because I think England, particularly England, has a dissenting tradition that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta. You know, the great challenge of any people, how to hold absolute power to account. That's what Magna Carta was about. It's in some ways what the Reformation was about. It's definitely what the Civil War was about. It's what the Chartists were after. It's what the suffragettes were struggling for. It's what the trade unionists were trying to do in the workplace.

It's what the Labour Party was set up for. And in many ways, the welfare state was founded to try to hold the capitalist system to account. And that struggle for accountability has defined our country. It's defined our country. And so when we reject all of that, we're rejecting the chartists. We're rejecting the diggers. We're rejecting the levelers. We can't afford to do that.

That's our tradition. We don't have to be proud of it, but we have to recognize that their struggle was our struggle and take strength from that. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. might say yes. A nice tan? Sorry, nope. But a box fan? Happily yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with

Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. There are no recordings of Orwell's voice, as I said earlier. Which is, he did all these broadcasts for the BBC during the war, but of course they didn't...

They're just live, yeah. They're live, there's no trace of them. We do have a clip here, however. I'm afraid it's taken from a, like, what's clearly a VHS of a VHS that somebody's bunged up on YouTube, so I am sorry, it is a bit hissy. But it's two of Orwell's contemporaries talking about him in the early years of the war and talking about the lion and the unicorn. So this is first you're going to hear the voice of Tosco Fiverr, recorded in the early 80s,

and then John Kimchey. Fred Warburg had an idea of forming a little group of what he called like-minded people. So he invited me and he invited Orville and one or two other people, and there I first met Orville. Well, he had a brief period in the independent Labour Party where he had been absolutely against the war. But yes, he had become an English patriot, quite inevitably. When the call came, he was there. And then Orwell's Lion Unicorn came out. And here was somebody who had never been accused of being a super patriot or pro-imperialist, suddenly arguing very cogently and very effectively

that this was a war that had to be supported. I felt, I mean, it turned people around who had been against it and began to support the war. In my case, I felt it was a great shot in the arm. It gave me much greater confidence. I'm very interested in other people's words about Orwell, and I'm just going to read... Orwell wrote a description of himself for a biographical entry.

He wrote this just before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn. And, Bill, if you were writing this kind of thing about yourself, if you listened to how he wants to position himself in the minds of his readers in 1940. Imagine they'd never, and they don't know who George Orwell is, they've never heard of him. He says, I served four months on the Aragon front with the Poon militia and was rather badly wounded, but luckily with no serious after effects. Since that, except for spending a winter in Morocco, I cannot honestly say that I've done anything except write books and raise hens and vegetables.

What I saw in Spain and what I have seen since of the inner workings of left-wing political parties have given me a horror of politics. I was for a while a member of the Independent Labour Party, but left them at the beginning of the present war because I considered that they were talking nonsense and proposing a line of policy that would only make things easier for Hitler. In sentiment, I am definitely quote-unquote left, but I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free of party labels.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reed, Samuel Butler, Zola, Flaubert, and among modern writers, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me the most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. Outside my work, the thing I care about most is gardening. Especially vegetable gardening. I like English cookery

and English beer, French red wines. It's like soul mode. It's like Tinder. Sideway stripes. Some are separate, some are forgettable. I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, fancy, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires,

candlelight and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motorcars, the radio. He's working in radio at the time. Tinned food, central heating and modern furniture.

My wife's tastes, sorry ladies, he's married, fit almost perfectly with my own. My health is wretched, but it has never prevented me from doing anything that I wanted to except so far fight in the present war. I ought perhaps to mention that although this account that I have given of myself is true, George Orwell is not my real name. That's really weird because it makes him sound like,

kind of in a single person, Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Both in one person. It's the weirdest image in my mind. You go from central heating, the radio, he's going to say the internet. The only thing he misses is G-O-S-H. It's funny this hatred of the radio. Larkin was always going on.

We did Larkin yesterday. He's always going on about the radio and how annoying it was. Turn it off! Yeah, chillax, George. Susie, have you got a bit for us to listen to? Yes, I've bagged a really famous bit, but as I went through, I was underlining, marking, and I might as well have underlined and marked the entire thing. And also looking at things that seem very resonant today, it doesn't feel

like a historical document at all. But this is the bit I picked. England is not the jeweled isle of Shakespeare's much quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either, it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it, but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kowtowed to, and poor relations who are horribly sat upon. And there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family's income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories. And at the approach of an enemy, it closes its ranks.

A family with the wrong members in control. That is perhaps as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. How great is that? It's stood the test of time. It's unfortunate that we can all... It resonates with us still. I think it's actually incredible to read... When we do this podcast and we do them in front of an audience, it's really exciting to read a piece of prose on the paper and think, well, that might work, or that's quite interesting, or that's well written.

But when you read that, Susie, the effect it has on the room room you can feel everybody kind of sit up in their chairs a little bit still for something that's written when that's like but you have to have to say there are great chunks of the book that don't make sense anymore because one of the oh one of the things obviously is writing during the war and he has experience of of street fighting of citizens armies in Spain, he imagines that the Home Guard could become a revolutionary army. Yeah. And obviously he's never seen Dad's Army. But his image of armed citizens, he actually encourages left-wingers to join the Home Guard

and to learn to fire weapons because he believes that they're going to be the vehicle by which this revolution of his is delivered. And obviously, you know, that wasn't true. But the perspective that he had then of change, in many ways, he's correct, because the Second World War was such a catalyst in British society, not just because of the election of the first Labour government

and the foundation of the welfare state, but through so much of what happened in the years after the war. Nationalising industry. Yeah, yeah, he's right on it. It just wasn't the revolution in the sense that he imagined it would be a revolution. He can't imagine how capitalism can survive the war, doesn't he? He thinks it's a knackered system and that you basically need

collective ownership in order to beat Hitler, and that that would change the country so much that you'd never go back to the past. And in fairness to him, he was right, because the Soviet Union did more or less defeat Hitler. And that's the perspective he had. He saw that a command economy that was focused on one thing, which was defeating the enemy,

would be the only way to actually achieve that. And he didn't think that British capitalism in the way it was configured in 1940 would be able to do that. What he didn't see was that the war economy would adapt itself. I don't know if this is widely known but the welfare state emerged out of a situation during the war when they decided that they would give free health care to the people who went out during the Blitz to try and look after you know the air raid wardens they got free health care at the hospitals then they realized that the people who went to dig them out would to try and look after the air raid wardens, they got free health care at the hospitals.

Then they realised that the people who went to dig them out would have to have free health care. Then they realised the people who were dug out would have to have free health care. Then they realised that mothers and children would need free health care in the war economy. Eventually it came to the situation where there was free health care for everybody. At the end of the war,

why would you want to go back to how it was before? So in some ways, British capitalism did adapt, but not in the way that Orwell was imagining in the book. You were saying, John, you found it quite poignant to read the book because you sort of know, we know what happens next. We know what happens. And it's that thing. I mean, I think it's an immensely brave book. He's sitting, I mean, literally the bombs are falling around him and he's kind of taking

this view on patriotism, knowing that he's going to put himself at odds with the Labour Party and a lot of the people he would have aligned as colleagues. I mean, that independence of Orwell, his ability, even at the worst moment, you know, the maximum peril, to think as clearly. OK, the six-point plan that he outlines didn't quite come to pass, but a hell of a lot of it did. He saw the future more clearly.

And it's not a surprise to me that that kind of bravery ended up being fictionally expressed. I mean, because Animal Farm, as we've said, the reason that they're fables and they're capable of being misinterpreted is that they're really, really good fables. I mean, good fables have to be able to be not just the intention of the author.

Also, the other thing is his health. He's just a few years... He died at 47. He was seriously ill through all of his 40s. He's fantastic on the empire as well, dismantling the empire and freeing people and liberty and equality for all, and that's incredibly stirring. Yeah, he doesn't want... It's a very interesting, nuanced argument. He doesn't think India should just be given back.

Yeah. And, of course, that's exactly... In terms of the geopolitical situation at the time. He just thinks there needs to be a kind of managed handover, which, of course, there wasn't. But he's also about the way the change would happen, a very English way about that. He talks about that the change will not be doctrinaire or even logical.

It will abolish the house of lords, but quite probably not abolish the monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere. The judge with his ridiculous horsehair wig, the lion and the unicorn on the soldier's cap buttons. You know, he recognizes that things will change, but some things will remain the same. And I think that those people who fear change don't recognize how the essence of what we are and who we are persists. It kind of, you know, people add to it, people take away from it, but there's a core running through the middle of it that persists.

And we, you know, we need to be confident about that as a people. You know, there's a, you know, Brexit is a vote of no confidence in us as a people to be able to hold our own in Europe, sit at the table and make a contribution. It's, you know, we kind of lost that. And at the time, you know, when the world was, reading this reminds me of something my dad once said to me. We were watching a film and there was Churchill doing We Shall Fight Them on the Beachy speech. And I said to my dad, do you remember hearing that on the radio?

He said, yeah, I do, actually. I said, wow, that must have been like... And he said, well, the thing was, at the time, we didn't know we were going to win. And I thought, yeah, wow. Because obviously we're sitting there years later. I know how this film is going to end. But for Orwell and people like my dad and that generation,

they didn't know they were going to win. Even in the later year, in 1944, after D-Day, when the army got stuck in Belgium and the V rockets were coming, more people died under terror weapons than during the Blitz. It took a while finally to that last push to get to Berlin and the Russians to get to, the Russians to get to Berlin and we to get to the Elbe. So they didn't know what the outcome was. He's writing at a time of real, if you think we're in a time of national crisis now, forget it. Yeah. Well, Susie, you were saying about Orwell as an essayist,

and because we're a books podcast, I want to just mention one particular essay that Orwell wrote. This is a really good little book which you can buy for a fiver called Books Versus Cigarettes. It contains an essay where he tries to say, why are people complaining about the price of books? Books are much better value than fags. And he proves it to his own satisfaction. And mine, frankly.

And there's another really funny one called Confessions of a Book Reviewer. But I'd just like to read this. I used to be a bookseller. John used to be a bookseller. We did a podcast in here on Friday about a book by Pierre Bayard called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. And Orwell was a bookseller and he wrote an essay called Bookshop Memories. And this is how it ends. The real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it, I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books and that gives him a distance from them. Still worse is the fact that he's constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books. I loved the sight

and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were 50 or more years old. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop, I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, 5,000 or 10,000 at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays, I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead blue bottles.

Isn't that great? So good. Can I do one last? Yeah. This is Orwell. It's another essay called Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. And it's Orwell standing by a pond looking at toads shagging. Massive, writhing bodies.

I love this. How many times have I stood watching the toads mating or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily, they can't. So long as you're not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still

going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. Great. So I'm going to open it up to questions, if that's all right with everyone. We've got a gentleman right at the back there. Yes. You referred to England. Does Orwell necessarily exclude what's happening on Clydesdale? Did everyone hear that? You referred to England. Orwell writes about England, very specifically England rather than Britain or the UK.

Does Orwell have stuff to say about what's happening on Clydesdale, for instance? Not in the book, he doesn't, no. I think he's speaking as an Englishman in that sense. And I think there is a case to be made for Orwell to be the quintessential Englishman who went to Eton, was active in the Empire. He was in the Burmese Imperial Police Force. He went to fight in the International Brigades. How do you reconcile those two things? You know, you don't. So it breaks the stereotype of the Etonian imperial servant of the king.

He then comes back. He doesn't become a Marxist. He doesn't become a supporter of Stalin. Quite the opposite. He's chased around by those guys. And then he tries to pitch something down the middle with the lion and the unicorn and other things he writes. It's much more about human nature. It's about watching frogs have sex. And that key, you know, you don't get much of that in Trotsky. If you've read, you know what I'm

saying? This is one of the few books about political philosophy that doesn't over-intellectualize things and tries to get to those emotional things that really are about how we feel about our country. That moment, that sunset you see, the noise of those trees, that place you went when you were a kid and you go back there. Everyone feels that, but your special place is your special place. And whether we love it or hate it, England is our special place. I'd just like to add about... APPLAUSE

No, thank you. I'd just like to add about Orwell as a writer that I think Orwell's great strength as a writer, clarity of prose, sure, clarity of thought, sure. He has a fantastic bullshit detector. He has no time for bullshit, and his bullshit detector is so finely tuned that he applies it to himself to see if he can swerve it. So in the writing,

there are arguments going on with the left, the right, and himself to see if he can get to the position he needs to get to. And I think that is one of the things that commends him to us as readers, that there's humility in the prose, even when he's making the big statement the personality is that of a reasonable man making a strong statement and you were talking about Larkin yesterday and whenever we talk about Larkin we have to talk or at least mention the biography that made many of us think he wasn't a very nice man and we've haven't had to do that with Orwell we read I can't think of anything, you know, he's solid. That's because he died when he was 47. We were wondering if he'd lived, whether

he'd have become grumpier and more right wing as he got older. Twitter spats. Twitter spats, yes. Yes, gentleman down the front there. The thing I was going to ask is what do you think Orwell would make of the localisation of identity? So, for example, a Northerner or a Southerner, a Londoner, obviously, but as we're here, a Cornishman or a Cornish person? So, the gentleman, a really good question. What would Orwell make of the localisation of identity in Britain? A Northerner, a Southerner or a Cornish person here? I mean, he has quite a progressive view, doesn't he?

He does. You've got a quote for everything. No, I don't, but I'm looking about to find it off the top of my head. But he does talk about England, you know, being the trucks on the... He's talking in 1940. The trucks on the Great North Road, the pubs up in Blackburn, the fishermen down on the coast. He's trying very hard to...

It's a very difficult thing because you always leave things out. It's a very personal thing. Identity fundamentally is a personal construct. You are what you think you are. It only becomes a problem when someone tries to tell you what you are based on your ethnicity or where you're from or your accent or anything like that. And I think that we can't say to people,

you are English just because they were born in England and they speak English. I have friends of colour who just can't accept it because when they were younger, they had to fight because people said they didn't belong. We can't say to them, you are English, but what we can do is create a space, a compassionate space, where we can come together with some sense of belonging and compassion for one another, that we can say, this and we happen to this society has to be called english you don't have to wear

the badge mate but it's absolutely crucial to me that you feel comfortable in this company because this is this is who we are yeah great yes so we've got so we've got two more questions. This lady here, yes. I just wanted to take up your making of the question. So the question about Orwell and nature and global warming. I guess you're asking how would he have dealt with global warming. There's a lot of nature in his essays. He was a keen gardener. One guesses that Orwell being smart would have been on the side of, I mean, he wouldn't have been a climate change denier.

You know, he was, as Andy says, he was very, very tough. He researched impeccably. There are issues, some arguments go on about whether or not he actually shot the elephant that he wrote the amazing essay, Shooting an Elephant. Sonia Orwell, his wife, used to get very cross when Bernard Crick used to bring up the book. Did he actually really, or did he just write a really brilliant account of it?

But I think as far as climate change is concerned, you're right. In a way, it's more interesting to think that that wasn't such a big issue when he was writing. Probably should have been. And my guess, and you can only guess, is that Orwell would have written brilliant essays on it. Mainly what you think when you read Orwell is, if only we had him writing today. Yes, last question, just this here in the front row. How do you square the circle with Orwell's belief that the British people were fundamentally not militaristic, with his own militarism as expressed in his desire to fight in Spain, and his thought that there needed to be some kind of armed uprising?

Well, I'm only guessing. I would say that the threat of fascism, as it was in the 1930s and 1940s, required you to pick up arms and to go and fight it. And particularly in Spain, where the great powers weren't bothering to do that. I mean, he's well off on some of the things he says about the English people, that they have no artistic talent whatsoever. I mean, there are many off on some of the things he says about the English people, that they have no artistic talent whatsoever. I mean, you know, there are many things I would disagree with him. And in some ways, he's writing very much of his time, you know, the opening line about the highly intelligent beings dropping bombs on him.

I think it's bound to be couched in those terms. His idea of a revolution is an armed revolution. It's not the social revolution of the 1960s. It's not the sexual revolution. It's, you know, out in the streets, up against the wall, that kind of revolution.

So I think that focuses on those kind of subjects. That's my sense. Okay, listen, we have run out of time. I would like to say thank you to Susie Fay and Billy Bragg

for joining us today. This has been a brilliant discussion as far as I'm concerned. This is what is good about book festivals. Paul Elliott, podcasts, right? It's wonderful. And you've been such a brilliant audience. Thank you so much.

Our website is backlisted.fm. We're on SoundCloud. We're on iTunes. Let's just hear a little bit of the music and all join hands and feel English in a good way so round of applause please for our guests for yourself for paul elliott listen listen listen listen look before we go before we go, before we go, it's not often that we have these kind of conversations.

We have this chance to come together and feel this way about what we've been talking about. I just want to finish off by reading something that Orwell says right at the back of the very last paragraph of the book then. He says, you know, but England's got to be true to herself. She's not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their excess profits tax. It is goodbye to the tackler and the bystander and farewell to the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and

Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, and the factories and the armed forces, in the four-hour bar and the suburban back garden. And at present, they are still kept under by a generation of ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even winning the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By revolution, we may become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging democracy, standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it. We must grow greater or grow less. We must go forward or backward. I believe in England and I believe that we shall go forward. I want you to stand. I want you to stand. Now that you feel this Englishness in your veins,

I want you to stand, I want us to sing together what should be our national anthem, I Will Lead. And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green Look upon England's mountains green And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant paths To the sea And did the countenance divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills And was Jerusalem built in here Amongst these dark satanic mills Second verse, here we go! Bring me my bow of burning gold Bring me my arrows of desire Bring me my shield, oh stars unfold I'm there! I shall not sleep from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land

how's that feel? how's that, Phil. Pleasant. Go, Barney's foot. Go, Barney's foot. Billy Bragg, Susie Fay, the Backlisted podcast. Give it up, people.

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