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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today I'm starting a new series. It's called Orwell's War and I'm going to be trying to tell the story of how the man who was perhaps, perhaps, the greatest political writer of

the 20th century, George Orwell, try to make sense in real time of the central political

event of the 20th century, the Second World War. How did Orwell understand it as it was unfolding?

How did he make sense of it? What did he see and understand

that other people missed? But also, just as interestingly, I'm going to be talking about all of the

things that he got, oh, so wrong. This series has got a tenuous, very tenuous connection with our last episode, the guest on

our last episode, James Marriott, who I spoke to about the movie Metropolitan last time

up. On his substack, he wrote about receiving a gift from his girlfriend at Christmas of the collected essays,

journalism, and letters of George Orwell in four volumes. And he said that he'd been an Orwell

sceptic, he had had no time for Orwell. He got these four books and was blown away by them,

completely grinned. My wife, Helen, who is also the producer of this podcast, read

that on James Marriott's substack. And so for my birthday, not that long ago, I got the four volumes

of George Orwell's collected essays, journalism and letters. I should say I was not a skeptic.

I've long been interested in George Orwell. I have read a lot

of George Orwell, but I hadn't read most of this. There is an absolute treasure trove of stuff in

there. And as I was reading it, I find myself thinking more and more about how it connected

...