Reading Orwell

A conversation with ⁠Professor David Dwan⁠ about Animal Farm (1945) and the annotated edition of it he produced in 2021 for the Oxford World's Classics series.

The third and final instalment of a 3-part mini-series looking at Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in hour-long episodes, focusing on Part III of the book.

The second instalment of a 3-part mini-series looking at Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in hour-long episodes, focusing on Part II of the book.

The first instalment of a 3-part mini-series looking at Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in hour-long episodes, starting with Part I of the book.

Today I talk to Liam Knight, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham working on a thesis addressing the question of 'endotextuality' in dystopian fiction. We talk about books within books and texts within texts, focusing on Orwell but with an eye on some other dystopian writers, including Margaret Atwood. In addition to his PhD research, Liam runs a brilliant GCSE revision resource, 'Dystopia Junkie', which you can find on YouTube.

A conversation with Professor John Bowen, about his recent experience of editing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) for the Oxford World's Classics series.

A conversation with Dr Lisa Mullen about Homage to Catalonia (1938) and the annotated edition of it she recently produced for the Oxford World's Classics series.

Is Nineteen Eighty-Four a love story? In this episode, we consider how love survives, to a degree, while also being twisted into new, disturbing forms in Orwell's imagined future of pain and terror.

George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, combines a sceptical view of the nostalgic with dread about a looming future of pain and suffering. This episode looks at how these emphases are bound up with the first-person narration of George Bowling, whose disreputability and misogyny makes him a compromised 'voice' for the modern world.

Orwell's mud. Homage to Catalonia shows how Orwell could turn the muddying of troops and the muddied waters of civil war into impressionistic form. This episode reconstructs these emphases, connecting them to Orwell's reasons for participating in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.