Reading Orwell

An account of Orwell's and Aldous Huxley's views of their most famous works, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Brave New World (1932), concentrating on how each writer thought they'd outdone the other in imagining the future.

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,...

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.

An episode considering how Orwell's most famous satire, Animal Farm , traces the equivalences between men and animals as part of its fairy-tale response to the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Stalin's Russia.

Is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) socio-economically voyeuristic? This episode discusses some of the issues surrounding this and related questions, giving an overview of why and how Orwell wrote this enduringly relevant account of poverty and hardship in the industrial north of England.

An episode about Orwell's least well-known novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), in which images of glue and stickiness denote the text's very particular concern with returns back to the normal and familiar.

Orwell's novel Burmese Days (1934) takes a dim view of empire, but is itself deeply prejudiced. This episode considers prejudice at two levels: the racist mentalities of the Orwell's characters, and the novel's own narrative expressions of lookism and fat-shaming.

Gordon Comstock--the great enemy of money, in Orwell. This episode looks at his rage, the deathliness of the world around him, and the poor choices to which his anger leads.

Orwell, down and out. In this episode, we track the various formal tensions in Orwell's first major work, his study of poverty and precarity in Paris and London.

A brief introduction to Orwell's prose style, and his critical 'voice'.

The diary, again, and Winston’s ongoing anxieties about memory, truth, and resistance.

Winston continues to write in his diary, and remembers his encounter with a sex worker.

What is Newspeak? Why is Airstrip One so dirty? These are the main questions tackled in this episode, which also considers Orwell’s views on politics and language.

What does Winston do at work? This episode considers his employment in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, and what this means for human history.

Many different kinds of water and liquidity feature in Orwell’s novel. This episode examines how wateriness structures the text in the form of resonant images, metaphors, and similes.

Why does Winston have to touch his toes? This episode considers this question as a frame for thinking about ancient times, the past, the body, and memory.

In this chapter, fate comes knocking for Winston Smith--or does it?