Robert Colls – George Orwell: Life and Legacy

‘Everything is freshly presented – his imperial origins and shifting politics, truth-telling journalism and relations with women. If you want a new view of Orwell, read Colls’ – The New Statesman

An authentic account of Orwell’s life and work from his birth in the high noon of British imperialism, to his death on the eve of the Cold War in 1950 – a life played out against a background of two world wars, the rise of communism, and the war-time pre-eminence of the US. Yet no matter how alert he was to the world order, and how guarded his personal life, Orwell never shied away from the question of who he was, and the contradictions that entailed. His 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, leaving him 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. His Identity of England (OUP 2002), George Orwell English Rebel (OUP 2014) and This Sporting Life (OUP 2020) were Books of the Year in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The New Statesman and the BBC History Magazine.