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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast, the first of the new year.

My name is Sam Leith, I'm the literary editor of The Spectator. And this week, I'm going to be

joined by two

writers and critics who are Dorian Linsky, the author of The Ministry of Truth, a biography of

George Orwell's 1984, and DJ Taylor, whose books include, on 1984, a biography of George Orwell's

masterpiece, so two 1984 forests. And it's

appropriate this week because George Orwell has a long last come out of copyright and we're

going to see the market flooded with all sorts of Orwellianna and hopefully cheap but rigorous

editions of his work. Welcome both.

I suppose to start, say, you've both written about 1984.

That's the thing most people think of when they think of Orwell, first of all.

Is that kind of the core of his work?

I mean, what's the important thing about Allwell these days?

I think that the problem is, and I'm sure Dorian would agree with this one, is that we now

tend to see Orwell's career, given that he died so quickly after the completion of 1984,

we do tend to see it as a form of teleology. You start with 1984 and then you work backwards and all the paving

stones which led along the path to 1984 then spring up. But the other thing about Orwell,

of course, is that if he died, say, well, at any time up until, including the Second World War,

I think we would have regarded him as an interesting minor writer. You know, there's a whole heap of stuff, thousands and thousands of words, six or seven volumes that precede Animal Farm, which was the book that really made his reputation.

And one of the wonderful things about him, and I've recently been rediscovering this with current work on Orwell, is that it all shapes up. Unlike many

a major writer in inverted commas, Homer never nods with Orwell. You can pick up a tiny

...