By 1949, George Orwell was dying. He didn’t know it, but the next 12 months would be his final stand against totalitarianism.
Stuck in the Cranham Sanatorium in the Cotswolds, Orwell, real name Eric Blair, was attempting to get over the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis, publish 1984, which he had completed by December 1948, and spread the readership of Animal Farm.
He would also cooperate with a new secretive organisation, The Information Research Department, and correspond with an agent operating for another unit from the secret world, The Pond.
With thanks to The Imperial War Museum, Paul Lashmar, Dorian Lynskey and Mark Stout.
Lashmar’s Spin, Spies and the Fourth Estate can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spin-Spies-Fourth-Estate-Lashmar/dp/1474443087/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1614502073&refinements=p_27%3APaul+Lashmar&s=books&sr=1-1
Lynskey’s Ministry of Truth can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ministry-Truth-Biography-George-Orwells/dp/1509890734/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RBKVCZKRPG2K&dchild=1&keywords=dorian+lynskey&qid=1614502154&s=books&sprefix=Dorian+Lynskey%2Cstripbooks%2C185&sr=1-1
Music credit:
Scott Buckley’s Machina, Beautiful Oblivion and Ascension licenced under CC-BY 4.0
Audio credits:
Emma Topping, Ash Steel, Norman Reddaway (interviewed by ©The Imperial War Museum) and Christopher Hitchens reading Robert Conquest’s George Orwell (1969) poem
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Research Resources
The National Archives’ FO 1110 series
History Notes from The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Report of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry
Britain's Secret Propaganda War by Paul Lashmar and James Oliver
In Celia’s Office by Robert Conquest for The Hoover Institute
Our Job Is To Make Life Worth Living (Complete Works S.) edited by Peter Davison
The Orwell Archive at University College London
The Centre for Conflict, Security and Terrorism at The University of Nottingham
Time To Explain by Christopher Mayhew
Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941–1991 by Brian Crozier
A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre
The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme at Churchill College, Cambridge University
The Oral History Programme at the Imperial War Museum, London
The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training at the Library of Congress
The CIA Reading Room
The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA by Mark Stout
The House of Commons’ Hansard Service for 13 January 1981
The Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive
