This episode is sponsored by the new Color Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

which looks at the way scientific breakthroughs in the Victorian period enabled dramatic changes in the use of colour,

in fashion, painting and other objects.

You can hear one of the exhibition's curators, Charlotte Rieberon, a professor of 19th century British literature at the Sorbonne,

explaining more about the exhibition and some of the objects and ideas it explores in a special mini-episode in our podcast feed.

Music You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is Colin Barrow, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and contributor of many pieces to the London Review of Books.

His most recent book is imitating authors, Plato to Futurity.

And with Claire Bucknell, he's presenting a series of close readings podcasts on satire

from Erasmus to Muriel Spark, and we'll have more details of how to subscribe to that later.

His last appearance on this podcast was in December 2022 when we talked about Roald Dahl,

a fairly nasty man who wrote extremely popular books for children.

Today we're discussing George Orwell and whether or not he has certain things in common

with Roald Dahl will perhaps come up later.

But Colin wrote about him in a recent issue of the LRB.

The piece was a review of three books.

Orwell, The New Life by DJ Taylor, George Orwell's perverse humanity, socialism and free speech by Glenn Burgess,

and Wifedom, Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life by Anna Funder. Hello, Colin,

and thank you very much for joining me again. Hello, Tom. Great pleasure to see you. As always.

So George Orwell didn't write children's books exactly, though many people first encounter them as children

or as teenagers, reading Animal Farm or 1984 at school. And that was certainly my experience. And yours too, I think, from what you say in the piece. Yes, 1984. We had to read in 1977 when it still seemed futuristic and horrible. But we were a group of very naughty boys who were set by our teacher to write our own dystopia.

And one of my classmates did stick up his hand and say, you know,

Orwell seems to have transposed the digits of 1948 to get 1984.

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