Animal Farm

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Animal Farm, which Eric Blair published under his pen name George Orwell in 1945. A biting critique of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, the essay sprung from Orwell’s experiences fighting Fascists in Spain: he thought that all on the left were on the same side, until the dominant Communists violently suppressed the Anarchists and Trotskyists, and Orwell had to escape to France to avoid arrest. Setting his satire in an English farm, Orwell drew on the Russian Revolution of 1917, on Stalin’s cult of personality and the purges. The leaders on Animal Farm are pigs, the secret police are attack dogs, the supporters who drown out debate with ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ are sheep. At first, London publishers did not want to touch Orwell’s work out of sympathy for the USSR, an ally of Britain in the Second World War, but the Cold War gave it a new audience and Animal Farm became a commercial as well as a critical success.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Steven Connor 4 episodes
  Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge
• Mary Vincent 4 episodes
  Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield
• Robert Colls No other episodes
  Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University

Reading list

• George Orwell
  Gordon Bowker (Little, Brown, 2003)
• The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain
  Tom Buchanan (Sussex Academic Press, 2006)
• George Orwell: English Rebel
  Robert Colls (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• George Orwell: A Life
  Bernard Crick (Secker and Warburg, 1980)
• Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War
  Valentine Cunningham (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1986)
• The Truth about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939
  Hugo Garcia (Sussex Academic Press, 2009)
• Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm
  Daniel J. Leab (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007)
• As I Please 1943-1945: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3
  Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.) (Harcourt, 1968)
• The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology
  Daphne Patai (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984)
• The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge
  Paul Preston (William Collins, 2016)
• George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory
  Richard Rees (Secker & Warburg, 1961)
• George Orwell
  Raymond Williams (Viking Adult, 1971)
• The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell
  George Woodcock (Black Rose Books, 1967)

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Programme ID: b07wgkz4

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wgkz4

Auto-category: 320.5 (Political science)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm at the height of the Second World War.