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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan.

And me, William Durhampool.

We are so excited because we have feminist icon who's written the most brilliant book to talk about this,

the fourth episode in our Orwell series.

Anna Funder is here and she has written the most sublime book, and I just commend it all to you.

Wyfton, Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life and it really does so much to turn everything you think you know about Orwell on its head, then put its hand down its throat, then turn it inside out, and then waggle it around in the air.

Anna Funder, welcome. Thank you so much. I've been keeping you two apart deliberately for months now.

The two of you together would be an impossible,

an impossible chemistry. Anyway, we'll see it in the next 40 minutes. It's going to happen in the

next 40 minutes. It's also going to happen when Anna comes to London. We're going to paint the town.

Very bright pink. Okay, painting the town pink for another time. Let's start, though,

with something where black would be a more

appropriate colour. And this is weird to start a podcast with somebody dying, but that's where we've got to

in the chronology of the story, Anna. So we want to talk about the end of Orwell's life. And let's talk about

TB because it was such a massive factor in the decline of a great writer.

Well, Orwell actually had terrible lungs all his life.

Even when he was a two-year-old, I went to the archives and opened up his mother's diary.

And his mother was this very lively woman who was bored to sobs, although she loved her children. And she

filled her diary with entries that just said, nothing in cursive. And the next day, nothing.

...