Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell is writing his finest essays but his life is mayhem so he escapes to the Scottish island of Jura with his baby son to write the novel that, little does he know, will make him a legend.

It's the story of a writer reaching the height of his powers while everything around him seems to be falling to bits. How did a sick man on a lonely island write perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century? Why is his strange masterpiece so widely misunderstood? What were Orwell’s blindspots? Would he have been a good hang? And are taking the right lessons from his life and work? All this, plus Nye Bevan, HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and the atomic bomb.

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Image: Peter Cushing (Winston Smith) with Yvonne Mitchell (Julia) and André Morrell (O’Brien) in the 1954 BBC production of George Orwell’s 1984. (Getty)

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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