George Orwell

George Orwell has never been more quoted and misquoted. Can he be rescued from the soundbites?
George Orwell remains a work in progress. He is, or has become, a meme, a global writer, a national treasure, a London statue, a scholarly society, a Prize and a Journal, a trope and a show, various movies and murals, too many misquotations, two adjectives, at least half a dozen fictions, and most recently a dead metaphor with plenty more accolades to come.
George Orwell: Life and Legacy is an intellectual biography which offers an authentic account of Orwell's life and work from his birth in the high noon of British imperialism in 1903, to his death on the eve of the Cold War in 1950-a life played out against a background of two world wars, the rise of communism, and the war-time pre-eminence of the United States. Yet no matter how alert he was to the world order, and no matter how guarded he was in his personal life, Orwell never shied away from the question of who he was, and the contradictions that entailed.
His two great modern masterpieces Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) arrived to define the age he lived in. Interest in him has never abated since; no writer is more quoted or misquoted. Orwell is in danger of being lost to soundbites. Colls reveals the author once again.

Robert Colls was professor of English History at the University of Leicester before joining the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, also in Leicester. He has written widely on modern British history, and for The New Statesman and the Literary Review, as well as for other newspapers and journals, and on television and radio including, most recently, The Rest is History podcast. His This Sporting Life (OUP 2020) won the Aberdare Prize for sport history writing.
His Identity of England (OUP 2002), George Orwell: English Rebel (OUP 2014) and This Sporting Life (OUP 2020) were Books of the Year in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The New Statesman and the BBC History Magazine.

- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Orwell in his own words
- 1: King's Scholar, Burma Sergeant, 1911-1927
- 2: Tramp Writer, 1928-1935
- 3: Down the pit and up again, 1936
- 4: Into Spain and out again, 1937
- 5: Man of the People, 1939-1945
- 6: Stepping up and stepping out, 1941-1945
- 7: Husbandom
- 8: Famous Writer, 1949-1950
- 9: Legacy
- 10: The Point of being Orwell
- Notes
- Index