George Orwell: life and legacy | Book Talk

Tuesday 27th January | 6pm

George Orwell: life and legacy

A talk by Professor Robert Colls

George Orwell remains a work in progress. He is, or has become, a meme, a global writer, a national treasure, a London statue, a scholarly society, a Prize and a Journal, a trope and a show, various movies, various murals, various misquotations, two adjectives, at least half a dozen fictions and most recently “a dead metaphor” with plenty more accolades to come.

George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Colls is an intellectual biography which offers an original account of Orwell's life and work from his birth in the high noon of British imperialism in 1903, to his death on the eve of the Cold War in 1950. Orwell's life played out against a background of two world wars, two great revolutions, one long global depression, the rise and rise of Communism, and the war-time pre-eminence of the United States. Yet no matter how alert he was to all these great struggles, and no matter how guarded he was in his personal life, Orwell never turned away from the question of who he was, and the contradictions that entailed.

His two great modern masterpieces Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) arrived to define the age he lived in. Interest in him has never abated since; no writer is more quoted or misquoted. Orwell is in danger of being lost to soundbites. Colls reveals the author once again.

Robert Colls was professor of English History at the University of Leicester before joining the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, also in Leicester. He has written widely on modern British history, and for The New Statesman and the Literary Review, as well as for other newspapers and journals, and on television and radio including, most recently, The Rest is History podcast. His This Sporting Life (OUP 2020) won the Aberdare Prize for sport history writing.

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | £7/£5 (concession)

(If you would prefer to book directly over the phone, please call the Library Desk team on 0191 232 0192 and they will be happy to help)

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