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Hello? forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm pleased to be joined by

the cultural critic and historian Dorian Linsky, whose new book is Everything Must Go, the stories we tell about the

end of the world, which is a gigantic compendium of every form of catastrophe you could think of

and must have been very cheering to write and research. Dorian, what sent you down this particular

do me rabbit hole?

It sort of flowed out of my last book,

Minister of Truth, which was a biography of George Orwell's 1984.

And the approach that I like to take is to look at the relationship between fiction and what is going on in the world, in politics, in journalism, in science, and so on.

And so obviously, if you're doing it through an Orwellian prism,

the dystopias you're looking at are political dystopias.

You know, there is still civilization.

There is still a state, but it's incredibly oppressive.

And I realized that I was having to put aside a lot of very interesting dystopias, which have

nothing to do with 1984, where everything falls apart. And then that just sort of stuck with me.

And I thought, oh, is there a way of using these stories throughout time, sort of throughout the last 200 years, and seeing how they reveal,

essentially, what we were scared of, what we worried about, what new technology was freaking

us out, what political developments were making us think it was all going downhill.

And then I found out that basically

...