Robert Colls ORWELL LIFE AND LEGACY with Dominic Sandbrook

Orwell Life and Legacy

George Orwell has never been more quoted and misquoted. Can he be rescued from the soundbites? 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 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 - a 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

Robert Colls was born in South Shields just 6 months before Orwell died, and attended Laygate Lane Junior School and the Boys’ Grammar Tech, now Harton. He was educated at the universities of Sussex and York and in 1979 started work at Vaughan College in the Department of Adult Education at Leicester University. He was formerly professor English History there, and professor of History at De Montfort University, also in Leicester.

He writes regularly for the New Statesman and the Literary Review.

Dominic Sandbrook

Dominic Sandbrook is a historian, broadcaster and columnist.

He is known for his best-selling series of books on life in post-war Britain- Never Had It So Good, White Heat, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun, The Great British Dream Factory and Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982– He has also written two books on recent American history, Eugene McCarthy and Mad as Hell and a six book series called Adventures in Time for younger readers. Most recently, he has co-written The Rest is History (2023) and the Rest is History Returns (2024).

Dominic has written and presented several series for television including the four-part series The 70s and The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook for BBC Two, Dominic has presented a number of other series including, Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction, a three-part series, Strange Days; Cold War Britain and a four-part series, Let Us Entertain You, in which he explored the extraordinary success of British popular culture over the last century all on BBC Two. He also presented a documentary about the German car industry’s successes, Das Auto: The Germans, Their Cars and Us for the channel.

Dominic co-presents the world’s most popular history podcast, The Rest is History, which has tens of thousands of subscribers and more than 100 million downloads.

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