302. Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist In India & Burma (Part 1)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim. And me, William Durumple. Very exciting. We're embarking on a four-chapter mini-series today on one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. This is a man who started his life in Imperial Burma.

He then goes on to write incredible critiques of totalitarianism that really seem prescient and describe things that are going on today in the world around us. And I'm talking about, well, you've probably guessed it, things like Animal Farm and 1984. We are going to be talking about George Orwell. Orwell is, I think, the most fascinating figure because he gets so much right. I spent a lot of my teens and twenties reading those 1920s and 1930s writers who were very much the canon when I was at school and university.

And already they were all describing a world that had disappeared, that was dated. To read war was to read archaeology of, you know, the bright young things, this whole world that was long, long gone. And the only one who seemed to be talking ahead of his time to be prescient and seeing the future. was Orwell and books like Animal Farm in 1984, although they were dark and although they were describing a world that, thankfully, never fully happened, they are well ahead of the visions of his contemporaries. They have this sort of clairvoyance about them.

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