Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on tonight's show. I have a very special guest coming to us from the UK. His name is Dorian Linsky, L-Y-N-S-K-E-Y. He recently published just on June 4th, a new book titled Ministry of Truth, The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.

His preceding book was titled 33 Revolutions Per Minute, A History of Protest Songs,

and I think that was published in 2011.

And I also recently read an article he posted on LitHub.com. It's titled, We All Really Need to Reread George Orwell's 1984 how the message of a book can change radically over time.

And I definitely agree with that title.

And we're going to talk about the book.

Talk about the influences on Orwell and the book.

And I highly recommend this book.

So, Dorian, are you there?

Yeah. Awesome. Hi, all right. Hi. Well, thank you very much for agreeing to this. So for people who don't know your name,

if you can just talk a little bit about yourself, how you became interested in this topic.

And we can start from there. Okay, we're starting as a journalist in the 90s, mainly doing music,

but also sort of wherever possible things that interested me. Films and books sometimes, and

increasingly quite a lot of politics, particularly after the protest songs,

but because obviously it's as much about politics as it is about music. But I did study,

I did study English at university, and so I've always had this kind of relationship with literature,

and Orwell was just one of those people who was kind of

it was almost too obvious to say that you liked him because he's just such a part of i mean

british life particularly so he's always being cited 1984 is as famous as a novel can be.

And then in 2016, I started becoming interested in just trying to understand the history

of dystopian literature, like where these very familiar tropes come from, if you're

writing a dystopian novel now, it's sort of there there are so many

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