Empire: World History - 304. Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984 & Totalitarian Dystopia (Part 3)

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

What was the inspiration behind George Orwell’s most famous works? Why did he move to the remote Scottish island of Jura to finish writing 1984? What was Orwell’s “Snitch List” which he handed over to the government after World War 2?  In Part 3 of this miniseries, Anita and William discuss Orwell’s life during WW2 and deep-dive his two most famous works…Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. Now, of course, you don't need me to tell you, but we are in the middle of our little Orwell mini-series. And in the last episode we were talking about Orwell's time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, how he got dramatically shot in the throat, how his wife leapt in and saved his life

and got them both out. And it's during this time that he writes homage to Catalonia in 1938. And in that book, I mean, it's so much a signature of his thinking and developing and writing, he abhors the violence. This time of sectarianism on the left during three. the civil war. This period of, I think, always life, it's fair to say, is like watching a polaroid develop and stabilised, because this is the period when his political views really hardening adopts a new and very characteristic view of the world. And he sees the problem as being

the power and totalitarianism, which he contrast with libertarianism. Everyone else in his generation is thinking left or right. He sees extreme left and extreme right as totalitarian. And against that, he is for democratic libertarianism. And as we said in the last episode, this philosophy is brought out and developed and deployed in his two most famous works, Animal Farm in 1984. And this year of his writing is what we're going to be doing today. We are going to talk about Animal Farm in 1984 in great depth. A book that I know many of you listening to this podcast will have read at school. And it was an absolute joy to sort of reread them again for this. It works still, doesn't it? I mean, it's amazing. I also last re-read these books

when I was at a level. And quite a lot of books that you read and enjoy aged 18 or 19 don't necessarily work later in life. And these definitely do stand up. You found that too. Oh, God, it was ridiculous. I was reading out chapters to friends and family saying, you know, this could be about where we live today. This is about our house. This is about where we are. Anyway, look, following the publication of homage to Catalonia, Orwell briefly thought about going to India because at heart, he was a recorder of events. He was sort of living them, taking part in them, but also wanted to record them. So he's thinking about going to work in India, which is a place that he knows.

He wants to work for a newspaper called The Pioneer. It's a newspaper based in Lucknow. And the person who gets the job, if I'm not wrong, is his close friend, Malcolm Muggeridge. A Malcolm Mugge goes out and takes that job. rather than normal, as a result of which he gets to seduce the wonderful painter, what she called Amrita Shergill. Oh, right. Who's up in Simler with him. He has an affair with her, which is a very steamy stuff. If anyone wants to read an Amrita Shergill biography, Malcolm Mugridge and her in 1938-39 in Simler is one of the highlights of the story. Anyway, I digress.

Actually, just on Amritha Shergill, I mean, it's a name that everybody in India will be completely familiar with, but not maybe people in the West, but I really urge you to go and Google what she looked like. This woman was film star material, beautiful and elegant and an amazing painter. But getting back to Orwell himself, these plans that he had of going to Indian becoming a great journalist, you know, there in the gritty front line, you know, sort of talking about things that really mattered. It was his health that thwarted him because he got very, very seriously ill in 1938 with TB tuberculosis. And so he's incarcerated for six months in a sanatorium with only his thoughts as company. And he's discharged in September. And also, you know, sort of dispirited.

Health was one thing, but also dispirited because homage to Catalonia had sold pretty poorly. And, you know, he wasn't this sort of great celebrated hero of letters that he had thought he might be. Do you know, Anita, if TB was a thing that many people suffered from at this point? Because I'd imagine it was a rare and unlucky thing to get by this stage, wouldn't it be? Well, I mean, a very unlucky thing to get, and not as rare as you might think, unlucky, because the antibiotics used to treat TB had a few years yet to be discovered. So Orwell gets TV at a terrible, terrible time. So yet when TB ripped through a population, it really did let rip.

So yes, he was hugely, hugely unlucky. That autumn, after he comes out of the sanatorium, and you can just imagine the bleakness of how he feels. He's been really ill. He's been really depleted. He's been in isolation almost for six months. and his first book did not do well that really matters to him. You know, it's a complete trial by fire in his life to go through what he did in Spain. It hasn't done great. So you've got sort of

friends of his rallying around. And this is another thing about his life is that friends rally around him and pick Orwell up when he's at his lowest point. And there's a novelist called L.H. Myers, who says, OK, you know what, Orwell, you've got to buck up and I will pay money so that you don't have to worry about how to eat, how to live. And I think you should really go to French Morocco. I think you'll like it. I think the warm climate is going to be good for your chest. And I think it's just going to be something different and new. So Orwell takes his wife, you know, the same wife who saves his life when he's shot through the throat, and they go off to Morocco in 1938. And they travel around Gibraltar and Tangier. They avoid Spanish

Morocco for obvious reasons because the man's just been shot in the neck. And they reach Marrake. And there, and this is, again, such a romantic thing to say, on the road to Casablanca, they rent a villa. And that's where they sort of, they hunker down for several months. And at this point, he gets to see French colonialism in action. And he and Eileen don't take to it, which of course is no surprise as we know his views. Eileen writes at this point, you'll probably have heard that we don't like Marrakesh. While Orwell himself writes, the French are every bit as bad as ourselves. but somewhat better on the surface.

The backdrop to this, you know, where he's sort of putting himself together, is that Europe is beginning to fall apart, and Europe is crawling towards war. Everything one writes, Orwell says, now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice. And at the same time, as he's writing this, there's news coming in from Spain,

and that too is debilitating. He writes, you know, I had news of the few Spaniards I had known and always that they had been killed. So a man who's trying to sort of put himself together, who's trying to find something brighter, something hopeful to look for, he doesn't see it in the world around him, he doesn't see it from the news from Spain. Again, all of this is really very crushing.

And then something else happens, William, to flatten him further. Well, two things happen in 1939. First of all, he gets the news of his father's death. They hadn't been particularly close, and his father was a lot less lively a character and less of an influence on him than his mother. Nonetheless, it struck him, I think, more than he realised. And then, of course, 99, the war breaks out.

And the Orwells are back in London in the middle of the Blitz. And there's these extraordinary entries in his diaries and in his letters. A downed airplane tumbles out of the clouds, just like a snipe that has been shot high overhead. And you noticed a few churches whose spines have broken off in the middle, making them look like lizards that have lost their tails. He's really in his flow now. He's also there. I mean, you know, this is a thing about Orwell. He's there at times that really matter. So there is one occasion during the Blitz, a bunch of residents from the East End who are absolutely terrified of this death raining down from them from the sky. Charge the Savoy Hotel,

which if you don't know is one of the grandest hotels in London. And they say let us in. They're hammering on the doors. Let us in because we need to use it as an air raid shelter. And again, this is instructive for Orwell. Look at this. It's a class hammering. on a door that won't open to people who are the have-nots in London. And he writes, when you see how the wealthy are still behaving in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war, you think of St. Petersburg in 1916. And with that, of course, he's talking about the Russian Revolution and how Zars were toppled and ownership was upended in Russia.

It's funny, because that's not at all our perception, is it, of the Blitz? We think of the Blitz as being a time when everyone's together. The myth is, you know, the Pathé newsreels, everyone's down in the underground together, yeah. Or alternatively, we think of, you know, all those people, you know, the love charm of bombs, all those people having sort of frantic affairs as their libraries go up and smoke and their houses are smashed up. But Orwell is developing his sort of political program at this point. He says there is a six-point plan that he would like to develop for British politics. Number one, nationalisation. Two, income limitation. That's a popular one for any election.

platform. Three, democratic reform of education. Four, dominion status for India. Five, an imperial general council quotes in which the coloured peoples are to be represented, unquote. And six, an anti-fascist alliance. And Orwell's wife is working now at the censorship department, at the Ministry of Information, very 1984, in central London. And can I just say this belies a lie in the All-World story, the All-World mythology that is often told, because, because it is so often taught in schools that Room 101, the place where Truth goes to die, where Paul Winston Smith, who is working in Room 101, the worst place in the world, is charged with rewriting history every few days.

It was always said to me that, oh, look, that's the office in Senate House Library, which is a place I used to go to frequently, where Orwell used to work and do this stuff, which drove him mad, you know, that he had to keep twisting truth. It wasn't him at all. It was Eileen who worked in the censorship department of the Ministry of Information. So she's working away. He and they both are staying with her family in Greenwich. And, you know, very much you get the sense.

I think it's fair to say that somehow, you know, his manhood is being chipped away a little bit because she's doing the interesting work, the important work. They're staying with her family. And he's still, you know, sort of trying to build himself up from the beleaguered few months that he's had before. So he tries to do something about it. He submits his name to the Central Register for War Work, but they don't want him. And again, it's another blow to what we have discovered and will further discover is an enormous male ego that wants to be useful, that wants to do something, that wants to lead any kind of revolution with this six-point plan as everything that's on fire around you. So he turns instead to the BBC, doesn't he?

And 41, he's taken on full time by the BBC's Eastern Service supervising cultural broadcast to India. to help counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links. And so Orwell, who's been such a vocal anti-imperialist all his life, finds that his primary duty is to disseminate British imperial propaganda at India, bolstering Indian support for the Allied war effort. And the BBC was, of course, subject to strict censorship policies at this stage, and Orwell absolutely hates it. And just to say a little bit more about trying to counter Nazi propaganda,

The Germans were aiming so much at India to try and cause mutinies in regiments. You had Goebbels himself reminding the populace in India of what the British had done to them during the Raj. It's 1941, so it's a year after Michael Edwyer, the man who is responsible for the Jeline Wallabar massacre, has been gunned down by an Indian in London, Utham Singh. And Goebbels is going out on the radio saying, you know, he is a hero, he shot the British. this is what they are all like. And so you can see the sort of panic in London and in Whitehall that, you know, we cannot let this fester and go unanswered, which is why all this stuff is pouring out of the BBC. Now, he writes in his diary at this time, he's sick of it.

He might be able to understand why it's happening, but he doesn't like it. And this is what he says. One rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. I'm regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting the attack on Russia, but I don't believe it to be so. And in the same entry a little lower down, he says, all propaganda is lies, even when one is dealing with the truth. I don't think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing and why. Now, I hate to say this, Anita, for one who is so loyal to her BBC life, he regards these years as wasted years.

Thanks. You've tried to get me to leave for ages. This is like a complete public feeling. I think you should just do empire. I think full-time empire is what we need to do. Anyway. Spend more time with you. That's what you've always wanted to do, isn't it?

It is. It's a dream one day. Anyway, all is on my side because he regards the BBC office environment, and this is a direct quote, I'm not making this up, as something halfway between a girl's school and a lunatic asylum. Do you find that in detail? Well, look, notably, there is a room at the BBC, which is called Room 101, because I should have said the room in Senate House was never called Room 101. And so there are a lot of disagreements about whether it was based on Senate House or whether it is, you know, this Room 101. But look, there's an amalgam of this. And again, this is how his life funnels into his writing and becomes what we now know to be 1984, where the truth goes to die.

So in both of their ways, him and Eileen, who are sort of very idealistic people, are going in and tampering with truth for one reason or the other. So Orwell writes this fabulous essay, Freedom of the Press, at this point. and I think you can see that it absolutely stands as true today as it did then, if not more so. This is what he writes. The British press is extremely centralised and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veils censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of a body of a very given moment.

ideas which is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done to say it. Just as in mid-Victorian times, it was not done to mention trouses and the presence of a lady. Yeah, brilliant. It's a great example. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds themselves silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing either in the popular press or in highbrow periodical. So it's not surprising that he leaves the movie you see in 1943. He's had enough.

No more Room 101. No, that's it. He's out. And he starts channeling himself into the writing of what, I mean, I think it's extraordinary, this piece of rage and frustration for children, Animal Farm in 1943. I mean, I don't think it, he wrote it for children at the time, but it is now a book that children study in school. And all whilst mother dies around the same time.

And he does get to tell her that he's starting on a new book, but she has no idea that it's going to be 1984. But everything that he's just gone on in the last few months, the frustration with big organisations, that scene of hammering on the door of the Savoy and people not being allowed in, you can see it. You can feel it in the birthing of 1984. What I'm interested in is that he's able just to give up work in the middle of the war, because he's only 40. It doesn't like he's no man. Eileen supports him.

It's not surprising at all. Eileen, who's carrying this man for a lot of their marriage. I don't mean that. I mean, aren't you obliged? I mean, if you're not in the army, to be doing some useful propaganda work or something at this point? You couldn't just go off and write a novel when you fancy it. Well, I mean, I don't know.

Maybe he's ill because, you know, the TB is ravaged his lungs. That would make him fail. But can I give you just an overview of Animal Farm, just in case you are one of the eight people listening to this who hasn't read it? So this is all initially set on a farm where you've got a farmer Jones who's in charge and he treats his animals appallingly. And so the animals decide that enough is enough. They see just horrible atrocities visited on the animals. They are worked too hard.

They're sent to the Knackers yard when they are dispensed with. And so there is a revolution. And you have these sort of characters who come to the fore. And most notably, I think, you know, you've got representations of Russia. So, you know, even though he's sort of dismayed by what's going on with capitalism in the Savoy, but it is the Russian Revolution that he's thinking of. So you've got this heroic, wonderful character who is just tragic and heartbreaking boxer the cart horse, who has this phraseology that comes up again. I will work harder, I will work harder. Napoleon is always right. And Napoleon is Stalin.

So you have sort of representations of the Russian hierarchy. You've got Snowball, who is Trotsky, who's going to meet the same end in animal farm that Trotsky meets in real life with an ice pick to the back of their head. And you have all the pigs who will become both at the same time, those who run the state and eventually do exactly to Boxer, what the capitalist system did to Boxer and Farmer Jones did in that they work him to death and they send him to the Nacca's yard to be turned into glue. But you also have a dig at what's going on in the Russian Revolution because he doesn't believe in them. He believes they are monsters who are visiting monstrous actions on the people. I have to say Boxer, when I was learning this at school, sort of reflecting real-life events, Boxer has this thing of he does more work, he does the harder work than anybody else.

He's the horse who stays, who works later when the sun goes down. You know, when something goes wrong, he says it must be due to some fault in ourselves. He blames himself rather than anybody else. And what is interesting is that in Russia at the same time, a similar kind of time, or, you know, I think it was 1935, you have a man called, have you heard of Stacanov? No, I haven't. Okay, so I got obsessed with Stacanov at school because I was doing Russian history at the same time as reading Animal Farm. So Stacanov was a minor. Oh, is he the kind of champion worker?

He was the guy that kept giving the awards. Yes. I know this story. So, you know, they would set this sort of total, you know, monthly total. We want to have this many tons or in a day. we need each person to dig out 10 tons. Stackanoff would do it. They said, and Stuckanoff would do more. And so, okay, let's make it 20 times. Then Stackenoff would do it. Stuckanoff would do more. Then it would be 30 tons. Stuckanoff would do more. And then eventually, so the story goes on August the 31st, 1935, Stackanoff allegedly mines 102 tons of coal in a single shift, which is 14 times the quota.

And all of his workers say, bugger you. We hate your guts. But Stackenov is eleanor. to this sort of heroic level by the leadership, which is celebrating the fact that they are actually trying to work the workers to death. So you get the stucanovite movement at the same time. It's a dogleg, but I found it really interesting how current events are funneling into his fiction. Meanwhile, in London, the Orwells are living through the height of the Blitz, and a V1 bomb actually strikes their home in Mortimer Crescent. And they're forced to find someone new to live. But Orwell returns to his home in this very poignant moment with a wheelbarrow, saving what books he can from the rubble. So it's like a sort of scene from modern Gaza where he's sitting there trying to kind of move bits of rubble and finding his favorite novels under them.

But two other things happen. One is that they adopt a child. Neither Eileen nor Orwell seem to have been capable of having children. Orwell is believed to have been sterile. And Eileen may have been infertile due to uterine cancer. So they adopt a child. Then there's another major thing that happens, which is that his publisher, Cape, withdraws its offer to publish Animal Farm, after meeting with Peter Smollett, the Ministry of Information. And Smollett was later revealed to be a Soviet agent.

How fascinating. Isn't that extraordinary? So Smollett knew exactly what this was and how it would annoy his Russian or Soviet paymasters, and he quashes it. So again, you know, it's this crushing feeling for a writer. You've written something. You believe it to be good. I mean, William will tell you, writers normally have this sense of self-loathing that is the size of Mount Everest. But so I actually think, you know, actually this is good.

And then be told no one's going to read it. Utterly crushing. I find that you have this sense of that at the beginning. And normally by the end, when you worked on a novel or in my case, nonfiction, you think it's rather really quite good by the time you give it to the publisher. If the publisher doesn't like it, it's all the more catastrophic. So you've lost your flat and the book you've been working on. which you've given up your job to write and Eileen's made all these sacrifices to allow all the time to write is turned down by the publisher.

But somebody does publish it because you get another publishing company called Secker and Warburg who say, you know what, in 1945, we will publish it, we'll do it. So, you know, there is light at the end of the tunnel. And, you know, while this is all happening, their personal life is in turmoil, they're having to move house, they move to Islington instead. and soon after they get the publishing deal, he starts to work as a war correspondent for the observer because David Astor of the observer thinks there is something in the fire of this man that he wants to be on the front line, he wants to be something and he writes very, very well, so he sends him out.

Just to clarify Anita, how much success has he had up at this point? Nothing at this point. Nobody knows who George Orwell is. So he is still very much Eric Blair, you know, his other identity. people don't know that name George Orwell just yet. And so Astor is doing something extraordinary and perceptive to give him this job? He's taking a leap of faith and he's seen what he does and he obviously thinks of him more as a journalist. I mean, maybe the conversation you can sort of well imagine this, Orwell, give up this writing stuff and actually do what you're meant to do, which is journalism, which you're good at. So he sends him to liberated Paris and then on through Germany.

And this is the war, the Nazis have been routed. So he's traveling through this broken landscape, having left London. and one broken landscape, going through Paris, Germany, Austria. He's visiting these catastrophically destroyed towns like Cologne, Stuttgart, the sort of just flat wastelands. There are still corpses lying in the streets when he goes. And so his dispatches are full of the horror of what has been visited on Germany and Austria as well for the first time people get to see what was happening on the other side.

And these dispatches are published in The Observer, but also in the Manchester Evening News, which is a hugely powerful publication. I'll just read you an extract. It's from one of the articles that he writes that's published in February 1945. And he's talking about the state of the newspaper industry in Paris at this time. And he ends his article with. But the experience of occupation has produced a large number of new type of journalists. Very young, idealistic, and hardened by illegality and completely non-commercial in outlook.

And these men are bound to make their influence felt in post-war press. The public has also been educated by suffering. And French opinion as a whole has moved decisively to the left. If any freedom of the press survives, it is difficult to believe that the French people will again tolerate newspapers so stupid, scurrilous and dishonest as the bulk of those they possessed before 1940. He writes with a canon rather than a pen, even, you know, with his journalism. And then on the 29th of March, 1945, when he's in newly liberated Europe, Eileen enters hospital for hysterectomy. But instead, she dies suddenly from an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic. And many expected Orwell to give up the care of their nine-year-old son, but he refuses.

He briefly returns home after her death, then go straight back to Europe before returning again in London to cover the general election in July. And this is going to be something his relationship with Eileen that we're going to look much more closely at with Anna Funder, the author of Wifedom, which is an incredible book, which I warmly recommend. So we're going to not go too far into this now, but Anna Funder certainly believes that Sir Orwell was oddly heartless about his wife's loss and that he picks himself up and moves on far too quickly for her liking, certainly, in the aftermath of this tragedy. Let's take a break. And then after the break, you know, William was saying, you know, at the time that he's going off to write for the observer, does he have any fame and fortune? No, but it's

coming. Join us after the break. Welcome back. So as we were saying, you know, finally, George Orwell gets a publisher for Animal Farm and it comes out in August, 1945, and then it comes out in the United States a year later. And it's like a boulder. It starts rolling, then it starts rolling faster and getting bigger and bigger. By 1946, it had sold over 600,000 copies. So, you know, the man who was sort of sent through Europe is suddenly a name. He's a bestseller. And it is a massive, massive hit. That's not just a bestseller. 600,000 is a sort of spectacular sale even today. But at the time, when people were buying fewer books, it absolutely astonishing sale. Yeah. So we've sort of talked about Animal Farm already. And I just wonder whether, you know, you had a favorite bit of it from your memory of

reading it because we talked about some of them, Boxer being one of the characters I'm most obsessed with. You had Old Major, the prize-winning bore, and he is very much sort of an amalgam of Marx and Engels. It's their vision that inspires the rebellion. He says, you know, we must be together, we must rise up against oppression. He teaches the animals a song, beasts of England, but he dies too soon. And he leaves Snowball and Napoleon to struggle for the control of this legacy. As I said, it's Stalin and Trotsky who are in charge. And a lot of the events of the Russian revolution happen in Animal Farm. You have the character of Snowball who is very much like Trotsky, who wants to have an industrial revolution in Russia. He wants to build windmills. He tries to

tell the animals, look, if we can just work really hard right now, if we build this windmill, we'll only have to work a three-day week. And he's getting more and more popular. And if you've read this, you can see that this is not the kind of... thing that the other pigs want to hear because there he is sort of rising up very high. Napoleon in particular hates this. And finally, these lies start spreading around thanks to squealer where anything that goes wrong is down to snowball and snowball gets chased off presumably killed. And then, as I said before, the pigs who end up on their hind legs, it used to be a mantra as well, you know, four legs good, two legs bad, the pigs start wearing suits at the end of animal farm and walking on their hind legs

and they come up with a new mantra. Four legs good, two legs better. And so, you know, you have this whole sort of reversal and hypocrisy of what he sees as hypocrisy going on within Russia. And then, of course, the book ends with the most famous commandment which replaces all the others. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And it's not just that. I mean, he's sort of giving them lots to pour over because he writes this essay, You and the Atomb, which gets published in the Tribune magazine, actually as early as 1945. But he talks then about the repercussions of a, and this is a direct quote from him, of a state which was at once unconquerable and in the permanent state of Cold War with its

neighbors. Does he invent that phrase? I think there is an argument that he invents Cold War. I've heard that before, exactly, yeah. I've heard people say, no, no, it was there before. But the prevailing, I think, wisdom is that Cold War is him. That literally cannot be a 20th century novelist to invent more everyday phrases. Cold War, Big Brother, Newspeak. There's a whole range of oralisms which have entered the language. A hundred percent.

But can I just say with you and the Attenbaum, I mean, this is sort of 1945. He envisages a world because it was so unthinkable what happened in Hiroshima and Agassum. circu. And everybody is saying never again, never again, this will ensure never again. But he envisages at this time, and he writes at this time, the prospect of two or three monstrous superstates dominating the world and possessing weapons that can kill millions in seconds. And how prescient was that at a time when nobody thought anyone else would ever have the atom bomb, where America was swearing it would never use the atom bomb again. What he said back in 1945 has come to pass. So by 946, the alliances between the Soviets and the Western powers were icing over

at the end of the war. And in March, 1946, Winston Churchill reads his famous speech, warning about the rise of communism in Eastern Europe. And we've talked about this in our Yalta episodes, from Stetson to the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. That's a Churchillism rather than an Orwellism. Yes, one of the few that he didn't write. Yes, absolutely. And then, of course, in the US McCarthy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, becomes a senator, and you get the beginning of the anti-communists, which hunt, which goes on and spills into the 1950s. And this is something, of course, which will involve Orwell, because Orwell, as we will see, begins to compile lists of communists. Yeah. So look, while this is happening,

1946, such an eventful year. So his book is doing well, very well. He's become. known in America as well as in Great Britain. His wife has passed away. But what he does is he goes to the island of Jura. And you should explain what Jura really looks like because it is in the middle of nowhere somewhat. It is not the kind of place you would imagine a person with a 600,000 sale of a book is going to sort of repair to. I mean, if it was you or I, we'd be out there on the circuit, but he's not. He's in the inner Hebrides. What's it like there? So it's where I spent a lot of my childhood holidays. My parents who lived on a beautiful beach in North Berwick thought that their beach was as beautiful as anywhere in the world and refused to go

abroad, except they would take us in the Easter holidays to the only place that was even rainier and bleaker than the bit of Scotland. I grew up in which was the Hrebrenies. So we'd always go to either the West Coast or the Jury, always in the East holidays, which is the worst possible time to visit anywhere in Scotland. I know what they were up to. So my memories of Dura and Aaron and Benbecular and Harris are kind of a tarnish by just sort of staring out of the windows of rented houses watching rain trickle down the panes. But this was exactly that sort of house. He moves to this unbelievably beautiful but very remote house on the Isle of Dure. It's white.

It's two stories high. It's got a wee porch and it's whitewash and looking out onto a bleak moor. It looks like a place untroubled with heating and untroubled with. with hot water and maybe even in inside loo. He'd lived quite a lot of his life in houses like that, hadn't he? His first marital home didn't have any of those mod gods. So he has this cold chapter in his life, but he's writing the chapters of 1984 by Parraithin Lamp, which is not very good for that man's poor chest, let me tell you.

And an oddly unexpected place to write in 1984. I mean, he's been through the post-war wreckage of all these German cities. and he's seen London destroyed in the Blitz, including his own flat. But, you know, he's in a very different landscape when he's writing this. He's not in that 1984 landscape of Airstrip 1, at permanent war in this urban setting. He's writing this in the battle as remote and rural places you could find in Western Europe and, you know, visibly untouched by the war. So it's interesting.

He's conjuring up this vision from the destroyed cities he's seen the year before as a war correspondent and what he's seen in the Blitz. And he's pulling it all together in the complete solid. because he's on his own for the first time in his life. So he's in juror writing 1984. His wife is dead and he's on his own some of the time, but his sister, I think, Avril. And he has a housekeeper called Susan and this wee boy, Richard, who remembers him being a very good dad. So he's got some company up there. But, you know, there's no friends to go out to the pub with afterwards or whatever. And I suddenly find that when I'm writing, the one thing I want to do in the evening is get out and

mix with people if you spent the whole day with yourself. Anyway, he doesn't have that. And he's he's in Dura on his own a 20-mile drive from the ferry and a four-mile walk along the dirt track. The only thing that's going in Dendura at this point is distilleries, making very, very pety whiskey. He goes back to London with this manuscript. He's wrecked his lungs with this paraffin length. And it's at this point that Orwell decides he's just sick of being single. I mean, it's not long after his wife has died, Eileen has died, but this is a man who can't live on his own. So he is, I suppose, you know, if he lived today, would be swiping.

left like crazy, but he proposes to three women who all turn him down and finally proposes to a woman, a woman called Sonia Brownwell, who says yes to marry Orwell. Now, she is the assistant to his friend Cyril Connolly. Cyril Connolly is a legendary editor of a literary magazine called Horizon. Who'd been eaten with them right at the beginning? Yes. Yeah, they'd been huge rivals. Do you remember, you know, it's either Cyril who's winning the prize or Orwell who's winning the prize. So he's sick and he actually is so sick that he gets married in his hospital bed on October the 13th with Sonia holding his hand saying, I do till death do his part. And to be honest, doesn't look that far away if he is so ill. But what's important about Sonia is she is glamorous and she is clever. And some believe that Sonia is the model for the character Julia in 1984. Now, I think we should talk about 1984 for those who haven't read it. Tell us what you remember of it because it made a huge impact on you and me. It did. I remember reading it in one of those fancy pelican editions that had those sort of, is it khaki spines or grey spines? It is this dystopia. It's the world of Airstrip 1, which is a country permanently at war. Big Brother is watching you. The television is on all day blaring propaganda and it's a two-way television so it can look into your flat. You're being constantly spied upon. protagonist is Winston Smith. And the state is called Oceania. He's under the oppressive rule of

Big Brother. And every aspect of life is controlled through, well, Constance events, but also the thought police. Yeah. And one of the most epic, I think, and it's not, it's a small part of the book, but it absolutely haunted me is there is a moment where Winston Smith, one of his neighbours, is a very nice man called Parsons. He's really, you know, cheerful and he's loyal and he loves Big Brother and when they're doing their exercises and they're shouting and screaming at the screen as it's mandated to do at certain times. And if you don't do it, you're in trouble and you'll cart it off. He is the man who is more loyal than the king. And it eventually turns out that it will be his daughter who denounces him for not being loyal enough. And so the thought police come in.

It is the most terrifying thing to see people being dragged away by these stormtrooper-like soldiers who come often in the middle of the night. And Winston Smith looks at Parsons, this cheery chappy, who is loyal and good and more loyal than he is to the state, being dragged away. And the last thing that Parsons says is, I'm not angry. I'm proud of my child, my seven-year-old daughter, for denouncing me. He says, it was my little daughter.

She listened at the keyhole. Her daughter I was saying, nipped off to the patrols the very next day. And then he says, admiringly, pretty smart for a nipper of seven, I don't bear a grudge for it. In fact, I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit. And Parsons is dragged away, presumably, to be tortured by the state. It is, to me, completely chilling.

And there are many chilling moments in 1984. There's a brilliant description of it in DJ Taylor's life of all. And the two books, if you're interested in reading more of all, is Anna Funder who'll be coming on the show next week to talk about all as a husband and that whole side of his life. But DJ Taylor, who's a literary critic, writes beautifully about 1994. I'll just read a tiny bit from it. He who controls the past, controls the future. Past time in 1984 is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments of detail.

There may at one point be talk of a nuclear warhead that fell on Colchester during Winston's childhood. But the wider political landscape, the rise of Big Brother and the formation of Oceania, goes more or less unmentioner. and yet the attitude of the Oceanian authorities to the past is double-edged, highly interventionist at the same time, deeply sinister. Its achievements are not there to be admired, to be explored, or even to be used as a yardstick to measure the triumphs of the present. Rather, they are there to be plundered and falsified as a way of authenticating contemporary reality. History is constantly being manipulated to justify current misdeeds, while history's visible symbols are constantly being adapted to suit present contingency. Nelson's statue in the renamed Victory Square is taken down

for its plinth and replaced by an effigy of Big Brother, and the nearby Church of St. Martin's in the field is reinvented as a waxwork museum of military glory. The past is only useful or even tolerated if it does the presence bidding, and an aristocrat is an evil little man in a top hat whom history records in a single act of grinding the proletariat into the dirt. I mean, he writes brilliantly about Orwell. He, I urge you to read Taylor on Orwell. But they also underlies what we know now that Orwell introduces these ubiquitous phrases into the English language, thought, police, big brother, newspeak, all of these things. In 1948, the power of Orwell, the power of his words and his arguments, start becoming a matter of concern or interest to the powers that be.

So the post-war Labour government in 1948 sets up this anti-communist propaganda unit within the foreign office called the Information Research Department. Now, you would think that the first person they would look into would be Orwell. But actually something rather extraordinary happens. Exactly. This is something which is always weighed against Orwell's admirers, because he produces a McCarthy-like list of communist sympathizers. He does. It is his snitch list. So he sits down and he, despite everything that he's ever believed in, the totalitarianism and going behind people's back and the secret shadow state. And the O'Brien's, by the way, one character, which is so memorably played in the TV adaptation of 1984 by Richard Burton,

the guy O'Brien who takes him into Room 101, the worst place in the world. This is them. And they are asking people to provide lists of communist sympathizers, snitch lists, and Orwell does it. and he provides a list of how many, do we know how many names? No, it's quite long. I've seen the first page of it. Right. And it only gets down to D.

So, no, I presume it's about four or five pages long. So with this list, I mean, what will happen is surveillance will happen. That's what will happen to his friends, to people who've trusted him, to people who have either loved him or been loved by him. They are going to have their lives like Parsons upended. He's basically done what this seven-year-old kid is done, which is denials. announce them? Well, yes and no. I mean, there are two views about this, and I don't know. I oscillate, I swither and I dither between the two. So for some, this is, as you call it yourself, a snitch list that exposes Orwell's legitry and hypocrisy, and there are those that argue that

he's, as you're just doing, portraying the very principles of intellectual freedom that he champions. Others see it as a principled, albeit flawed, action by a man whose focus is now on fighting Stalinism. Maybe he even knows by now that Animal Farm was not published because one of his friends turns out to be a Soviet agent. Well, that's interesting, actually. Yeah, and he's aware of how many Soviet agents there are in powerful places, and many others have been exposed since. So, you can take the view, and some defenders of all will take the view that this is principal. But, yeah, I think I'm with you. This is not what you'd expect all to do. There is something ick about it, but actually, you know what, I'm sort of becoming a little convinced by your arguments as well.

If you are a principal person and you see the worst happening in Soviet Russia and you want to prevent that, then wouldn't you do something about it? That is a really interesting. You know what? Join our Discord chat, EmpirePoduk.com, EmpirePodukuk.com and just tell us what you think. Which side are you on in this argument? Because although I was very firmly... I think we seem to convince each other. I'm rather coming over to your...

I'm crossing over to yours. If you see that, you know, people responsible for massacring great swades of the population or... or driving them to the knacker's yard is coming your way. Wouldn't you do something about it? It's a conversation anyway. Look, so let's end this episode just by thinking about his legacy as a writer, you know, just as a writer. Because we are going to carry on with Anna Funder, brilliant Anna Funder,

who's going to talk about the missing women in his life. I can't wait. I feel this is an uncomfortable episode coming up. Exactly. It's going to be just like we had two Scots against you in the... Oh, Barry Pittock. In the John Buckin episode, I feel it's going to be two women against me in the Anna Funder. Let me tell you people who aren't members of the club won't know about this, but we have had an excellent recording session with Murray Pittock, the great Murray Pittick, who's been on this pod before.

One of our best ever bonus episodes, I think. Fascinating man, John Buckin, he author of The 39 Steps, but also a politician, a statesman, a statesman, governor general of Canada, who lived at the most interesting times. And professional Scotsman. Professional. Yeah, so there's a lot of that. Let me just warn you, there's a lot of that that goes on. But yeah, do join our club if you want to listen to these bonus releases because that's the only place you're going to hear them. But finally, what do you think has been his legacy to the world? What do you think of when you think all well? Well, I mean, there's no question that his most famous two books are Animal Farm and 1984, and that what he's remembered for by probably 90% of readers is his critique of totalitarianism. But I'm a fan of his early anti-imperial writings on Burma. I love his short stories and his essays. I love his writing on class in Britain.

I think he's every bit as great a non-fiction writer, as he is an essayist, as he is a novelist. And may I just say, as far as legacy is concerned, I cannot believe how resonant what he writes is today. That's one thing, and we've banged on about that quite a lot. But the second thing is, for a man with very complex moral compass throughout his life, He simplifies a really difficult discussion in both of those books that children get it. They got it when I was a kid. They get it now if you're the parents of kids.

There is something that is so marvelously powerful about that writing that they will get it at different levels at different times of reading. And as I said, I sort of reread them both for this recently. And I saw things again, oh, I missed that. Oh, that's so clever. Oh, I wonder if he's talking about this. So do go pick up your Orwell anyway. If you want to listen to the next in our Orwell series, that's another reason to join our club, EmpirePod UK.com,

because you get them all together. You don't have to wait. You get the weekly newsletter. You get book discounts. And you get that brilliant bonus on John Buckin. So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durember.