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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 ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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This episode is brought to you by Ebay Buying a car should feel secure, start to finish. That's why you should buy your next ride on ebay. Whatever you're into, eBay's got it. From classics to SUVs and trucks to imports all in one place. And with secure Purchase, the process is streamlined and protected. Secure purchase means no DMV visit. Sellers and titles are verified, all the paperwork is handled, and financing, delivery and insurance options are built right in. Plus, eligible vehicle purchases are backed by up to $100,000 in protection. Looking to sell your ride? Secure purchase makes that easy, too. Your buyer and their funds are verified, and the title transfer and loan payoff are totally seamless. So skip the hassle. Shop with confidence. Buy your next car on ebay. Ebay Things People Love Secure Purchase is powered by Caramel Dealer Services, LLC, an eBay subsidiary. This episode is brought to you by Spotify Portal for Backstage. But you're wondering what's Portal? Well, it's an internal developer portal built to improve developer experience and boost productivity. All software components. Components are centralized, documentation is automated and easy to maintain. New projects and components just a few clicks. With your best practices already built in, think less friction, more innovation. Ready to double your productivity? Try Spotify portal@backstage.Spotify.com hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand, and me, William Duranpool. Now, of course, you don't need me to tell you, but we are in the middle of our little Orwell miniseries, 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 the Civil.
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A
War, this period of, I think or was life, it's fair to say, is like watching a Polaroid develop and stabilize, because this is the period when his political views really harden. He adopts a new and very characteristic view of the world, and he sees the problem as being the power and totalitarianism, which he contrasts 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.
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B
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.
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A
It works still, doesn't it? I mean, it's amazing. I also last reread 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. Did you find that too?
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B
Oh, God, it was ridiculous. I was reading out chapters to friends and family saying, you know, this, 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 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 news based in luck now.
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A
And the person who gets the job, if I'm not wrong, is his close friend Malcolm Muggeridge. And Malcolm Muggeridge goes out and takes that job rather than Orwell, as a result of which he gets to seduce the wonderful painter, what she called Amrita Shergil.
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B
Oh, right.
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A
Who's up in similar with him. He has an affair with her, which is very steamy stuff. If anyone wants to read an Amrita Shergill biography, Malcolm Muggeridge and her in 1938, 39 in similar is one of the highlights of the story.
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B
Anyway, I digress, actually, just on Amrita Shergill. I mean, it's a name that everybody in India will be completely familiar with, but not. 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 India and 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.
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A
Do you know, Anita, if TB was a thing that many people suffered from at this point, because I'd imagine it was a dise, which was a rare and unlucky thing to get by this stage, wouldn't it be?
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B
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 TB 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 awesome. After he comes out of the sanatorium, and you can just imagine the bleakness of how he feels. You know, 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. martin Myers, who says, okay, 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, Morocco, for obvious reasons, because the man's just been shot in the neck. And they reach Marrakech 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.
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A
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.
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B
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.
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A
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, 1939, 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 aeroplane tumbles out of the clouds just like a snipe that has been shot high overhead. And he notices 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.
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B
And 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 czars were toppled and ownership was upended in Russia.
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A
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 Pathe 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 in smoke and their houses are smashed up. But Orwell is developing his sort of political program at this point. He says there's a six point plan that he would like to develop for British politics. Number one, nationalization. Two, income limitation, that's a popular one for any electoral platform. Three, democratic reform of education. Four, dominion status for India. Five, an Imperial General Council quotes in which the colored peoples are to be represented. 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.
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B
And can I just say, this belies a lie in the Orwell story, the Orwell mythology that is often told because it is so often taught in schools, that room 101, the place where truth goes to die, where Thor 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 that 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 is on fire around you. So he turns instead to the BBC, doesn't he?
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A
And 41, he's taken on full time by the BBC's Eastern Service supervising cultural broadcasts 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 all absolutely hates it.
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B
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 O'Dwyer, the man who is responsible for the Jallianwala bag match, has been gunned down by an Indian in London, Udham Singh. And Goebbels is going out on the radio saying, you know what? 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. You know, 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. 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.
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A
This, Anita, for one who is so loyal to her BBC life, he regards these years as wasted years. Journals from the time she's been trying.
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B
To get me to leave for ages. This is like a complete.
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A
I think you should just do Empire, I think, full time Empire. What we need to do anyway, spend.
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B
More time with you.
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A
That's what you've always wanted to do, isn't it?
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B
It's a dream. One day, anyway.
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A
Always 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, Anita?
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B
Well, look, notably that 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.
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A
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 centralized 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 veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment, there's an orthodoxy, a body of 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 trousers in the presence of a lady.
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B
Yeah, brilliant. That's a great example.
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A
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in highbrow periodicals.
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So it's not surprising that he leaves the movie you see in 1943, he's had enough.
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A
No more room 101.
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B
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 he wrote it for children at the time, but it is, you know, now, a book that children study in school and Orwell's 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 has 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.
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A
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 isn't like he's no man.
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B
Eileen supports him. It's not surprising at all. Eileen is carrying this man for a lot of their marriage.
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A
I don't mean that. I mean that 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.
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B
Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know, maybe he's ill because, you know, the TB has 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 knacker's 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 knackers 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 Stakhanov?
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A
No, I haven't.
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B
Okay. So I got obsessed with stocking off at school because I was doing Russian history at the same time as reading Animal Farm. So Stakhanov was a miner.
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A
Oh, he the kind of champion worker. He was the guy that giving the award. Yes, I know this story.
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B
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. Stuck on off would do it. They said stuck on off would do more. And so, okay, let's make it 20 tons. Then stuck it off would do it and stack it off would do more. Then it would be 30 tons. Stackenhoff would do it. Stackenhoff would do more. And then eventually, so the story goes, on August 31, 1935, staken off 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 Stakhanov is elevated 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 Stakhanovite movement at the same time. It's a dogleg. But I found it really interesting how current events are funneling into his fiction.
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A
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 somewhere new to live. And Orwell returns to his home and this is a 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 move bits of rubble and finding his favorite novels under them. But two other things happen. One is that they adopt a child. Neither Ailly nor Orwell seem to be incapable 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.
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B
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, this crushing feeling for a writer that 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 to actually think, you know, actually this is good, and then be told no one's going to read it, utterly crushing.
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A
I find that you have this sense of that at the beginning and normally by the end, when you've 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 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.
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B
But somebody does publish it, because you get another publishing company called Seca and Wahlberg who say, you know what? In 1945, we will publish it, we'll do it. So, you know, there is, 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 IS 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.
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A
Just to clarify, Anita, how much success has he had up at this point?
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B
Nothing at this point. Nobody knows who George Orwell is, so he is still very much Eric Blair. You know, he's his other identity. People don't know that name, George Orwell just yet.
- [23:48]
A
And so Astor is doing something extraordinary and perceptive to give him this job.
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B
He's taking a leap of faith and he's seen, 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, oh, well, 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. Then this is the war, the Nazis have been routed. So he's traveling through this broken landscape, having left London, one broken landscape, going through Paris, Germany, Austria.
- [24:20]
A
He's visiting these catastrophically destroyed towns like Cologne, Stuttgart, the sort of just flat wastelands.
- [24:27]
B
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 soon, stupid, scurrilous and dishonest as the bulk of those they possessed before 1940. He writes with a cannon rather than a pen, even, you know, with his journalism.
- [25:42]
A
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 anesthetic. 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 goes 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 Thunder, 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. But Anna Funder certainly believes that 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.
- [26:36]
B
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.
- [26:53]
A
This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs. It began with voices carried on the wind, arguments and taverns, whispers at kitchen tables, the tramp of boots on muddy fields. From sparks kindled in America grew an upheaval that shook an empire, gave birth to a nation, and altered the course of history. Ken Burns, landmark PBS series the American Revolution casts the familiar in a new light, illuminating stories left in shadow. The American Revolution is more than history. It's an exploration of the United States at its founding, its people, values, families and its place in the world. The choices of past and present are woven into the same fabric as the United states nears its 230Fiftieth year. These stories remind us that the revolution is not history pressed between pages, but a force still shaping the world today. The American Revolution premieres on Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app. This is an ad by our old mates. Better help. Empires are remembered for what they won, but defined by what they endured. As winter days grow colder and shorter, many of us endure in quieter ways, retreating into our own citadels, isolating ourselves and letting connections fade. This month, BetterHelp invites us to change that, to reach out, check in, call someone we haven't spoken to for a while, or simply remind a friend that you're there. It's striking how quickly the world feels lighter when we connect with others, when we talk through instant of carrying things alone. Therapy works in much the same way. BetterHelp has spent over 12 years helping people start that first conversation, matching millions to qualified therapists who can help them move forward. This month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com empire. That's betterhelp.com empire. This episode is brought to you by Attio, the CRM for the AI era. Empires require a strong foundation to flourish. The Romans based theirs around the power of Rome. The British relied on the strong hand of parliament and the monarchy. Attio understands that every business needs its own stable foundation. Instead of trying to build your business on top of generic tools, Attio's AI driven CRM means that anyone can build a CRM that works for their unique needs and purpose. Attio is built to support your business from day one. Empires also require efficiency. Rome would be nothing without its roads. Britain would just be an island without its sea power. Attio can give you real time customer insights and a platform that grows with you so you can finally stop wasting time trying to shape your business around somebody else's software and get on with what matters most, your customers. With Attio, you can do the real work of building your own empire, whether it's that small business, a startup, or an international corporation. Try Attio for free at Attio Empire.
- [30:34]
B
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.
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A
That's not just a bestseller. 600,000 is huge. Is a sort of spectacular sale even today. But at the time when people were buying fewer books, Absolutely astonishing sale.
- [31:14]
B
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 boar, and he is very much sort of an amalgam of Marx and Engels. It's their vision that inspires the rebellion. You know, he says, you know, we must be together. We must rise up against oppression. You know, he get, 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.
- [33:03]
A
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.
- [33:14]
B
And it's not just that. I mean, he's sort of giving them lots to pore over. Cause he writes this essay, you and the Atom Bomb, which gets published in the Tribune magazine, actually as early as 1945. But he talks then about the repercussions of, 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 neighbours.
- [33:33]
A
Does he invent that phrase?
- [33:35]
B
I think there is an argument that he invented Cold War.
- [33:38]
A
I've heard that before.
- [33:39]
B
Exactly, yeah, I've heard people say, no, no, it was there before. But I mean, the prevailing, I think, wisdom is that Cold War is him.
- [33:47]
A
There literally cannot be a 20th century novelist who invents more everyday phrases. Cold War, Big Brother, Newspeak. There's a whole range of oralisms which have entered the language 100%.
- [34:00]
B
But can I just say with you and the atom bomb, I mean, this is sort of 1945 he envisages a world because it was so unthinkable what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 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 super states 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.
- [34:37]
A
So by 1946, 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 Stettin to the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. That's a Churchillism rather than an Orwellism.
- [35:04]
B
Yes, one of the. That he didn't write. Yes, absolutely.
- [35:07]
A
And then, of course, in the US, McCarthy, Senator Joseph McCarthy becomes senator. And you get the beginning of the anti communist witch 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.
- [35:27]
B
Yeah. So look, while this is happening, 1946, such an eventful year. So his book is doing well? Very well. He's becoming 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?
- [36:04]
A
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 Hebrides. So we'd always go to either the west coast or the Jura, always in the Easter holidays, which is the worst possible time to visit anywhere in Scotland. I don't know what they were up to. So my memories of Jura and Arryn and Benbecula and Harris are kind of tarnished 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 Dur. It's white, it's two stories high, it's got a wee porch and it's whitewashed and looking out onto a bleak moor.
- [36:59]
B
It looks like a place untroubled with heating and untroubled with hot water and maybe even an inside loo.
- [37:05]
A
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 cons.
- [37:11]
B
So he has this cold chapter in his life, but he's writing the chapters of 1984 by Paraffin Lamp, which is not very good for that man's poor chest, let me tell you.
- [37:21]
A
And an oddly unexpected place to write 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 One at permanent war in this urban setting. He's writing this in the battle. As remote and rural a place as 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'd seen at the Blitz. And he's putting it all together in the complete solitude. Cause he's on his own for the first time in his life. So he's in Jura 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 in Jura on his own. A 20 mile drive from the ferry and a 4 mile walk along the dirt track. The only thing that's going in Jura at this point is distillery making very, very peaty whisky. He goes back to London with this manuscript. He's wrecked his lungs with this paraffin lung.
- [38:46]
B
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 Sonja Brownwell, who says yes to Mary 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.
- [39:20]
A
At Eton with them right at the beginning.
- [39:22]
B
Yes, yeah. They've 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 13 with Sonja holding his hand, saying, I do till death do us part. And to be honest, doesn't look that far away, he is so ill. But what's important about Sonja is she is glamorous and she is clever. And some believe that Sonja 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. Cause it made a huge impact on you and me.
- [39:57]
A
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 One, 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. And the 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.
- [40:42]
B
Yeah. And one of the most epic, I think, and it's a small part of the book, but it absolutely haunted me is there is a moment where Winston Smith, one of his neighbors is a very nice man called Park. 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're carted 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 and 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 chappie 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 7 year old daughter, for denouncing me. He says, it was my little daughter. She listened at the keyhole, heard what I was saying, nipped off to the patrols the very next day. And then he says admiringly, pretty smart for a nipper of 7A. 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.
- [42:10]
A
There's a brilliant description of it in D.J. taylor's Life of All and the two books, if you're interested in reading more of all, as Anna Funder, who'll be coming on the show next week to talk about Orwell as a husband and that whole side of his life. But D.J. 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. Pastime in 1984 is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments. Sense 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 unmentioned. 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 from 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 President's 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.
- [43:52]
B
I mean, he writes brilliantly about Orwell. I urge you to read Taylor on Orwell. But he also underlines 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 labor 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.
- [44:38]
A
Exactly. This is something which is always weighed against Orwell's admirers because he produces a McCarthy like list of communist sympathizers.
- [44:46]
B
He does it is his snitch list. So he sits down and he, despite everything that he's ever believed in, that totalitarianism and going behind people's back and the secret shadow state and the o'. Briens, by the way, one character which is so memorably played in the TV adaptation of 1984 by Richard Burton with Sky 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 sympathisers, snitch lists. And Orwell does it. And he provides a list of how many. Do we know how many names?
- [45:21]
A
No, it's quite long. I've seen the first page of it.
- [45:24]
B
Right.
- [45:24]
A
And it only gets down to. So no, I presume it's about four or five pages long.
- [45:30]
B
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 7 year old kid has done, which is denounce them.
- [45:47]
A
Well, yes and no. I mean, there are two views about this and I don't know, I oscillate, I swither and I do that between the two. So for some, this is, as you call it yourself, a snitch list that exposes Orwell's alleged bigotry 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.
- [46:21]
B
Agent. Well, that's interesting, actually.
- [46:23]
A
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 principle. But yeah, I think I'm with you. This is not what you'd expect all to do.
- [46:38]
B
There is something ick about it. But actually, you know what? I'm sort of becoming a little convinced by your argument as well. If you are a principled 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 empirepod uk.com empirepod uk.com and just tell us what you think. Which side are you on in this argument? Because I'm. Although I was very firmly.
- [47:01]
A
I think we seem to convince each other. I'm rather coming over to you and.
- [47:05]
B
I'm crossing over to yours. If you see that, you know, people responsible for massacring great swathes of the population 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, we are going to carry on with Anna Funda, brilliant Anna Funda, who's going to talk about the missing women in his life. I can't wait.
- [47:33]
A
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, in the John Buchan episode. I feel it's gonna be two women against me in the Anna Thunder but we'll see how it goes.
- [47:47]
B
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 Pittock, who's been on this pod before.
- [47:55]
A
One of our best ever bonus episodes, I think.
- [47:57]
B
Fascinating man, John Buchan. He Author of the 39 Steps, but also a politician, a statesman, Governor General of Canada who lived at the most.
- [48:07]
A
Interesting times and professional Scotsman.
- [48:10]
B
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 gonna hear them. But finally, what do you think has been his legacy to the world? What do you think of when you think, oh, well.
- [48:29]
A
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 nonfiction writer as he is an essayist, as he is a novelist.
- [48:56]
B
And may I just say, sort of 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 that 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 marvellously 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, empirepoduk.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 Buchan. So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [49:59]
A
And goodbye from me, William Darrymple. Hello history fans. It's Richard Osman and Marina Hyde here from the Restless Entertainment Podcast.
- [50:14]
B
Now, if your group chat's buzzing with celebrity traders, fan theories, Alan Carr gifts and Claudia Winkleman outfit inspiration, then our podcast is the place for you.
- [50:23]
A
Every week we've been reacting to new episodes of the biggest show of the year immediately after they air.
- [50:28]
B
And this Thursday's final will be no different. Join us for a live Stream debrief at 10:15pm from the ultimate set of Traitors fans us. Just search. The rest is entertainment on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [50:41]
A
Big dogs only.