D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life and its highly acclaimed sequel The New Life, and Masha Karp, Orwell scholar, former Russian features editor at the BBC World Service and author of George Orwell and Russia, join the Slightly Foxed team at the kitchen table in Hoxton Square to take a fresh and deeply personal look at the life and work of George Orwell. 

The man who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four defies categorization. In this quarter’s literary podcast David and Masha sift through newly discovered stashes of letters written by Orwell in the 1930s, and share personal recollections from his adopted son Richard and other living members of his inner circle to tease out fact from fiction and explore the legacy of Orwell’s life and work. 

We start with the chance discovery by a Bonham’s auctioneer of nineteen letters from Orwell to a girlfriend, found in a tatty old handbag on the floor of a mouse-ridden woodshed (thrillingly packaged in a nondescript envelope labelled ‘Burn after my death’). Then we’re off on a journey through the many-faceted romantic, literary, social and political aspects of Orwell’s short life, from the years when he was flitting between jobs and relationships in the small coastal town of Southwold and living down and out in Paris, to his death from tuberculosis in 1950 via his life-altering experience in Spain as a Republican volunteer against Franco. David and Masha draw us deep into Orwell’s world – a place of gangsters with gramophones, banned books, vanishing documents, encounters with KGB spies and yet more old girlfriends appearing out of the shadows with revelatory letters – and discuss the long reach of his influence on contemporary literature and political thinking.

Books mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

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D. J. Taylor, Orwell: A New Life (0:30)
George Orwell, A Homage to Catalonia (7:27)
Masha Karp, George Orwell and Russia (15:10)
George Orwell, Burmese Days (31:46)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (31:47)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (31:48)
George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (34:04)
George Orwell, Why I Write (38:22)
George Orwell, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, Essays (39:56)
George Orwell, ‘Dickens’, Essays (43:45)
George Orwell, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, Essays (44:28)
Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant (45:25)
Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (45:42)
James Aldred, Goshawk Summer (49:10)
Edward Chisholm, A Waiter in Paris (51:38)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (51:50)
Emilé Zola, The Drinking Den (53:18)
Claire Wilcox, Patch Work (55:11)

Related Slightly Foxed articles


The Nightmare of Room 101, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Issue 69

Betrayals, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Animal Farm, Issue 65

An Extraordinary Ordinary Bloke, Brandon Robshaw on George Orwell, Essays, Issue 56

Pox Britanica, Sue Gee on George Orwell, Burmese Days, Issue 40

All Washed Up, Christopher Robbins on George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Issue 21

The Road to Room 101, Gordon Bowker on George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Issue 11

Other links

The Slightly Foxed Calendar 2024

Readers’ Day 2023 
The George Orwell Foundation

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
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