"My dad works in B2B marketing. "He came by my school for career day "and said he was a big row as man. "Then he told everyone how much he loved "calculating his return on ad spend. "My friend's still laughing me to this day." - Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com/results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/results. Terms and conditions apply. Linked in, the place to be, to be. - Welcome to the new books network. - Welcome to new books in critical theory. It's a podcast that's part of the new books network. On this episode, I'm talking to Laura Beers about Orwell's ghosts, wisdom and warnings for the 21st century. So welcome to the podcast. - Thanks for having me on. - This is a fantastic book. It's one of those great books that is both a history book, a politics book, but it's also, I think, a book that is incredibly important and speaks directly to contemporary questions. And the place to start really with the book is a kind of why question. I guess why write a book about Orwell now and what is the, I suppose, kind of, contemporary motivation for the book? - Well, I've been teaching Orwell since, I guess, 2016, 2017. He's a writer whose relevance to understanding the early decades of the 21st century has always seemed to me self-evident. But in recent years, it's become clear to me his continued balance for understanding the 21st century. And I think the moment they really kind of crystallized the importance of understanding Orwell and reading Orwell, I'm in our current political moment was January 6th, 2021. And in the aftermath of the attack on the US Capitol, you had former president Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr. You know, claiming that this was Orwellian censorship when his father was thrown off of Twitter now X for his comments about the January 6th instruction. And similarly, Josh Hawley, who is a US senator from Missouri and a social and political conservative who had shown solidarity with the rioters and subsequently had his book contract canceled by Simon and Schuster saying that, you know, this was Orwellian censorship. And listening to this as someone who had been teaching Orwell for several years, I thought, you know, that's a real miss construction and sort of stretch at best of what Orwellian means and that there is space for revisiting Orwell in the context of our current politics because once you started looking for invocations his name in the last few years, they're everywhere. And they're used by both sides of the political spectrum. Effectively, anyone who finds their own politics being questioned or disagreed with, you know, has a tendency these days to say, oh, well, whoever is criticizing me is, that's Orwellian, you know, thought policing or that's Orwellian censorship. But actually, if you look at what Orwell has to say about the politics of truth, you know, it's more complicated than that. So that's what brought me into this project now. But then, as I'm sure we'll discuss, the book is about much more than just censorship and thought policing and kind of looks at Orwell's body of work in a much larger context, both in relation to the early 20th century and in relation to the 21st. - The book is sort of about two people, really. One is, you know, George Orwell, who I guess, you know, people are familiar with, the author, the commentator, the critic, the political activist, you know, the soldier in some cases. And then also, Eric Blair, and I'm sort of intrigued, 'cause as the book develops, it becomes, you know, much more focused on Orwell, but Blair is kind of always there. And I wonder, you know, in some ways, it's impossible to separate the two, isn't it? But if you could kind of introduce both of these people, and I suppose kind of, you know, how they differ, and maybe why Eric Blair becomes George Orwell. - Well, Eric Blair is his given name. He never legally changes his name to George Orwell. It is known to plume his written name. And Eric Blair is born, he's born in Madahari, in the British Raj. His father is part of the Imperial Civil Service. He comes from a long line of, you know, sort of empire family on both sides. And while he's born in India, he moves back to Britain with his mother and his older sister at the age of one. So he basically, you know, he has this Imperial category, but he grows up in Britain, where he attends prep school, and then goes on on a partial scholarship to Eaton. Doesn't go on to university from Eaton. Unlike several of his friends, well, he is at school who will become his, both his friends and his supporters later, in his literary career, as they go on to establish careers of their own via Oxford and Cambridge, and then a life of letters. But he goes back to the empire, and he joins the Indian Police Service. And he's given a choice of where he would like to serve and he chooses Burma, which is where his mother, who is part English and part French, but also from an Imperial family grew up. And so he's basically going back to his roots, in a sense, despite the fact that he himself had never visited Burma before joining the Indian Police. And so he is this kind of, as he describes himself, lower upper middle class child, Eric Blair. And naive in many ways he has, you know, what he refers to as a kind of bullshit socialist politics, like most young people of the day, in the wake of World War I, when he goes off, goes off to serve in the police in Burma. But there he has a real political awakening. So the birth of his political consciousness really takes place in Burma. And it's there that he realizes that maybe the British Empire is not as benign as he had been taught that it was, and perhaps born later, and eaten, that maybe the dynamics of social power are more complicated than he had understood them. I mean, effectively, because he was a scholarship boy at school, he had understood himself as the oppressed and the disadvantaged growing up. And then he realizes that, you know, his family, who are living off the civil service pension of several hundred pounds a year, and who are privately educating all of their children. And, you know, are really not as disadvantaged as he had perceived himself to be as a child, but actually that the entire position of Britain on the global stage is one of comparative power versus the disadvantage and exploitation of what we would now call the global South. And it causes a real rethink in his politics, which then when he returns to Britain, translates into looking at his own society at home through a new lens and begins a career, which one Orwell starts out, we think of him now as someone who writes about political oppression and really who writes about the politics of the Soviet Union. In many ways, that's what animal farm is directly about and how many people understood 1984. But what he begins his writing career is as a social critic of Britain and of the British Empire. And so partly the transformation from Eric Blair to George Orwell, as one that takes place in Burma, but in taking on the name George Orwell, he's signifying a break with his youthful self on the one hand. But he's also on a totally different level, he's sort of sparing his parents some embarrassment because he does come from this, what he refers to as a lower upper middle class, family with social standing. And he's writing about his social investigations going down and out, slumming in London's East End, his really vitriolic critiques of empire in his novel Burmese days. And he doesn't want to embarrass his parents. So in some ways, who he's living with at the time, actually, that his first book is published, you know, taking on a nom de plume is meant to spare them as much as anything. But his choice of nom de plume George Orwell is really one that's meant to tie him to specifically English identity, right? So he takes on the first name George after England's patron saint and then the surname Orwell, which comes from a river near where his parents are living in the Southeast at that point. His father's come back and retired from the Indian civil service and they're living in Southwold in a kind of effectively a civil service retirement community. So there is this tie to the land and to a very English identity in the name that he chooses to write under. - I mean, we're probably going to talk quite a lot about England a little later on. It's an England, an Imperial England, an England of Empire and also an England in the context of, as you said, kind of social injustice, social criticism, but also wartime as well. But one of the things you mentioned, you know, the kind of crucial book that I suppose many people will know him for animal farm, it is full of ideas and some of those are to do with social injustice. But there are also gestures I think in that book and also in 1984, which is the other supposed most famous book around questions of truth censorship. And one of the things that I was kind of struck by in the book is your sort of insistence of the importance and I agree with it of all well to contemporary discussions. And I'd be interested to know, I guess, what I suppose is understandings of things like liberty, truth, you know, how these figuring in some of his novels mean for kind of contemporary politics today. - So yes, I think that is one of the central questions of the book, right, is this tension, effectively, between ideas about liberty and freedom of speech, but then also the importance of truth in speech, both of which are very much emphasized by Orwell throughout his career. And, you know, there's this quotation that, hold on, can we just pause for a sec? And then just to, I just wanna find the quote and I'll start again with that. So it's easy to edit out. Right, yeah. So yes, that is one of the central tensions, I think, in Orwell's writing throughout his career is the tension between liberty or free speech, the right to have unstettered ability to speak your mind on the one hand, but then also this obligation to truth on the other. And so if we think about Orwell's legacy, there's a statue of him at broadcasting house in London and it has, underneath it, a quote from a preface that he wrote to Animal Farm that was never published, that says if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear, right? And this is, I think, closely associated with, you know, our understanding what it, you know, means to be, or to use the term Orwellian, that Orwellian is a society with censorship where people don't have the liberty to tell people what they don't want to hear. But the rest of his writing, I mean, he also has a very strong emphasis on the importance of truth in speech, right? And so if we think about that famous phrase in 1984, you know, about the importance of being able to say that two plus two equals four. Orwell crucially is not saying that people should have the liberty to say that two plus two equals five. O'Brien, the member of the Thought Police who is torturing Winston Smith in 1984, he was trying to convince him that two plus two equals five. And eventually his mind cracks, right? And he's willing to capitulate and he's willing to say that two plus two equals five. But that is the moment of Smith's defeat. It's when Winston has kind of lost his access to his own humanity and his sense of kind of self and liberty that he's willing to recite this kind of, you know, objectively false phrase two plus two equals five. Because for Orwell, really the essence of liberty is the ability to speak the truth, to say that two plus two equals four. And it's attention now when the term Orwellian is using contemporary politics, I think, when many people who know that they are effectively disembling, that they are spewing falsehoods and perpetuating what Orwell would have called double speak, often a kind of intentionally disingenuous narrative about the world around them. If any effort to silence them is condemned as Orwellian. But Orwell was not saying that people should have the liberty to lie about the world around them and to dupe their fellow citizens towards, you know, an end game of absolute power. He was saying people should have the right to speak out against those who are doing just that, right? And to say that two plus two equals four. - Well, one of the things that's most interesting in the book is the way that it's not a kind of sort of uncritical love letter to Orwell. I think you're, you know, kind of a pains in the book to kind of say actually, you know, there are things that are incredibly important and incredibly useful for contemporary life about Orwell's work. But at the same time, and I think there was a phrase that you've cited from somebody about how Orwell is kind of not our contemporary. And I suppose one of the ways we might illustrate this is, on the one hand, he's an incredible critic of imperialism. It'd be great to hear a bit about his critiques of imperialism. But at the same time, you know, his critique of imperialism is one based on the time he is living in and his views. I guess we probably think of as kind of problematic to use that sort of euphemism today, if not kind of our right racist, in fact. And it'd be good, I suppose, to get a sense with that case study of imperialism of the kind of, I suppose, balance between the contemporary importance, but also the idea of him being a character of his time. - It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to Monday.com. - Well, I think within the context of his time, the 1930s and early 1940s, when he's really politically active and writing, you know, or what was on the side of the age. He was a critic of imperialism. He advocated for Indian independence, even within the difficult circumstances of the Second World War. Actually, during the war, he backs off from his support for immediate independence for India, but he does say India should begin dominion status after the war and a path towards independence as quickly as possible, which is not something that many people, even within the Labour Party, are arguing at that point. So he is a critic of empire. He's someone who really kind of holds to that in the specific case of what should be done with the British Raj, the kind of jewel of the crown of British empire. From fairly early on. But his criticism of empire is more articulated through the lens of how empire corrupts the governing class as well as those who are governed. And you see this in particular in his short essay, it's one of his best to say shooting an elephant, which is, you know, a somewhat fictionalized retelling of his own experiences of police officer in Burma, when he is allegedly, at least in the story, being called a con to shoot an elephant that's gone into must, so into heat, and is trampled, you know, various property of the Burmese within the community. But he knows at the point that he shoots the elephant, that the elephant is no longer in must, is no longer a threat, that it's a kind of, you know, crucial source of income for its owner, and that shooting it would be both pointless, but would also kind of harm this individual, and would harm the local economy. But he feels social pressure from the Burmese masses, the sea of Burmese faces as he describes them, to do this thing that he knows to be wrong, because otherwise he'll lose face. And so for fear of losing face, which is the worst thing that could happen to an Englishman in Burma, he takes aim at and shoots this elephant. And then afterwards, you know, he's hanging out at the English club, drinking his gin and tonics, and everyone is saying, oh, it's such a shame, you know, that you did this, it was clearly the wrong thing, but they can understand why he did it, because everyone recognizes that you can't lose face in front of the crowd. And so it's really a story about the way in which he, the Orwell character in this essay, has been corrupted by his participation in this imperial system, more than an essay about the impact on the Burmese. So you hear very little about the man who owned the elephant, whose livelihood is presumably completely shattered by this, or about the mentality of anyone within the crowd who are just referred to as the sea of Burmese faces. And you get slightly more empathy for the actual people of the Raj in his other most famous imperial essay, A Hanging, which is again, you know, told in the first person, and is a perhaps somewhat fictionalized or retrospective gloss on a hanging that he ostensibly witnessed taking place in Burma. And he does, he offers a real humanity to the man who is being executed. As he portrays him, you know, he's someone who steps to avoid a puddle, as he's being walked to the scaffold. She is, is very much human. But at the same time, it is principally an essay about how the hanging of this man impacts the British and Burmese officers who are complicit in it, who order it and who carry it out. And at the end, this group of rulers of the Raj find themselves getting intentionally very drunk to wash the stain of their kind of dirty action and sensing this man who, we don't know his crime, but we assume he's sort of some kind of petty thief or something that you wouldn't think was, you know, his crime is not commensurate with the punishment being executed. And so again, despite the vaccine hanging, there is a recognition of the humanity of the Burmese. It really is an essay about how participation in empire corrupts the ruling class. And you see that as well in his novel about the Empire Burmese days, which he begins to write while he is in Burma and he doesn't publish till after he's come home and after he's published his first piece of nonfiction down and out in Paris in London. But again, this is a novel that really focuses on the white characters and the way that the empires destroyed the white characters. And there are multiple very, you know, I mean, in contemporary problem, Harlan's problematic descriptions of the native characters in the book who are, you know, described in animal life language and very negatively portrayed. And it isn't in any sense a kind of woke text, right? There is no real conscious recognition that these people are as three-dimensional and as human as the white characters that form the center of the novel. But all of these pieces are at least a real indictment of empire and a conscious indictment of empire. And so while there are real problems in terms of his racist language in a lot of these texts and his lack of awareness about what he's doing in centering the white community at the expense of the native population, he is at least trying to do the right thing and speaking out against the empire. And so I think, you know, we have to be careful not to let him off the hook for the ways in which there are kind of, you know, racist tropes within his writing and a lack of self-awareness. But also to keep him within the context of his time and to recognize that within the context of his time, he is a progressive critic and he is trying to do the right thing as he understands it. I mean, at the slight risk of kind of continuing some Orwell bashing, the kind of, you know, we have a similar kind of tension, albeit perhaps less progressively kind of conceived when we think about his views on gender. And I think the chapter on gender is really kind of interesting in the way that not only do you give quite, you know, sort of unflinching, kind of critical take on Orwell's gender politics and indeed, you know, the kind of gender politics of the time, particularly with regard to the feminist movement in England, in Imperial England at the time. But at the same time, you do kind of frame this by thinking about the way that, you know, not a simplistic, but his ideas are still relevant. But rather, I guess, a kind of critical look at the distance and the kind of differences we've got since then. And it'd be great, I suppose, to kind of continue that theme as we did with Orwell and imperialism about, I suppose, kind of what's useful from his gender politics, but equally, what do we need some critical of? Well, here, I'm going to give Orwell less benefit of the doubt than when it comes to his imperial politics, as I think really what's useful from Orwell's gender politics is little to nothing, you know? I mean, he tries very much to be on the right side of history and on the side of the angels when it comes to empire, when it comes to feminism, he has little time for feminism. There's a famous passage in the road to Wigan Pier when he's making the argument that a real problem that the British left needs to confront is that the socialist movement, as he understands it, is kind of a magnet for cranks within British society, as he calls it. And he defines cranks as, you know, fruit juice drinkers, sandalwares, vegetarians, sex maniacs, and feminist. So, you know, feminist in his description and he's writing in the mid-1930s are, you know, these cranky outside the norm of society, individuals. And you need to think about this in the context of the 1930s, which is not the era of suffragists as, you know, people might remember them from school or popular culture. You know, blowing up mailboxes and slashing paintings from the National Gallery and chaining themselves to the gates outside of Parliament, you know, which is all really, you know, goes away with the start of the First World War. By the 1930s, a feminist is probably someone who is arguing for equal pay for teachers or for admission of women into the civil service or, you know, the right of women to sit in the House of Lords, who might be involved with an international feminist peace movement, you know, who might be showing a bit more calf than women of a different generation or have cut her hair shorter, right? This is not an era of aggressive or radical feminist politics. And yet still Orwell looks at as feminist as somehow kind of crazy and cranky and outside the steer of social norms. And I think that reflects what his, you know, his sister referred to as his Tory anarchism. And, you know, sort of saying his politics in many ways were rebellious, but not his social politics, his social politics were Tory or were socially conservative. And certainly that is true in terms of gender norms. And I think the place where you can see it in his personal life most clearly are in his relationship with his first wife, Eileen Blair. You, unlike him, had gone to university, had gone to Oxford and had gone on to get a master's in psychology at UCL, was quite intelligent and well-educated. And he meets her at kind of a literary dinner party. But once they get married, she effectively gives up her own career ambitions to support his. She becomes his editor, his aminuences. And kind of, you know, helps further his career. And he accepts that uncritically. I mean, in his mind, it's sort of obvious that he would be the prima interparis within this marriage. And not just that, but in fact, the, you know, not interparis, you know, that she would make herself second fiddle and acknowledge that he was the more important one. And recently Anna Funder came out with a sort of fictionalized memoir, biography, wifedom, about Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair, Orwell's first wife, which, you know, in her retelling, shows Eileen is really resenting the way that she's made second fiddle to Orwell. But I think one of the things that, you know, is telling of the time, but also the dynamic of their marriage, is there is no real documentary evidence within her papers and her letters that she was particularly resentful of this role, which she seems to have taken on, because she, too, seems to have accepted that he's the more important and the more brilliant ones. So there's a complicated dynamic there. But I think there are other places, you know, I mean, it's one thing to critique an artist's personal life. But for those who would say, well, your personal life is something apart from your writing, and what's important is the writing. If we turn and look to the writing, you also see a very conservative gender politics coming through in Orwell's writing, which for me is more problematic than whatever happens behind the post-doors of his marriage, consensually. And there you see a critique of abortion, particularly that comes up repeatedly, and particularly in his novel, "Keep the Aspidistra Flying." You see a repeated belittling of female characters, even an animal farm, where all the characters are animals, right, the female animals get a bad rap. They are frivolous or unintelligent or, you know, inefficacious in various ways. So that Molly, the showpony, is, you know, an early traitor to the cause and is basically bribed by ribbons given to her by the capitalist farmers. Or Molly, the other workhorse is sort of dimwitted and unable to learn to read and to make any kind of effective opposition to what Napoleon, that kind of dictator pig, is doing. And again and again, you also, the way that he talks about imperial women like Mahal Hanne, who is the female concubine in his novel, "Burnies Days." It's extremely objectifying. There are kind of lengthy passages, gratuitously detailing sexual violence and down and out in Paris from London. There's a real dismissal of Julia's intelligence in 1984. And Sandra Newman has just recently written a novel entitled "Julia," which is a retelling of 1984 from Julia's perspective, which really, you know, its premise is what if we accept her intelligence and her kind of wholeness as a thinking mind as opposed to writing it off. And then imagine what this story would have looked like through her lens. And you see a very different and much more nuanced picture than we get of her in 1984. So I think in both his personal life, but also in his writing, there is a unwillingness to take women's viewpoint seriously. There's a real lack of engagement with women as workers, despite his defense in much of his writing of the working class. The idea that women are equal partners in society or that women's rights, including the right to reproductive freedom, should be taken seriously is kind of non-existent. And it is something that puts him not at the, you know, kind of vanguard of progressive politics for his time, but really, you know, bringing up the rear. And so I think we should think critically about what it means that someone did identify throughout his careers on the political left could have also had no time for feminism. And I think that's something that, again, has 21st century resonance, right? You know, most feminists consider themselves of the political left, but not everyone on the political left considers themselves the feminist. - Where then, I suppose, do we find him... I mean, useful such a utilitarian term, but that is like, they're trained by definition. - I don't know what it means, but, you know, to kind of like have a balance sheet of, you know, is all world useful or not, really kind of misses the nuances and the point of the book because you, you know, kind of brilliantly illustrated with that kind of critical engagement with his gender politics. But the end of the book engages with a couple of essays to the line and the unicorn and why I write. And I suppose that is the moment where you get the sense of a lot of his ideas coming together, his critique of England and, you know, the kind of broader English-British imperial system, you get a sense of, I suppose, you know, where some of his commitments to democratic forms of socialism may be, you know, useful for us today, maybe realized today, but at the same time, you know, we get a sense in, particularly the line in the unicorn, why those things have not been realized, both, you know, kind of here as what we've been talking in the UK, but actually, you know, kind of more broadly for other countries. And I wonder if you could kind of maybe introduce the essay and give that kind of sense of the extent to which it offers us a bit of a blueprint, but also the way that there are, I suppose, kind of limitations too. Sure. And you said a bit of a blueprint. The final chapter is entitled "Bluffin' For Revolution," making the case for democratic socialism and really does deal principally, as you say, with the line in the unicorn, though also with his wartime essay "Why I Write" and his other wartime essay "My Country Writer" laughed. But the Orwell of the early Second World War is in some ways the most optimistic Orwell. I mean, if you think back, those of you who are listening to "Red 1984," an animal farm perhaps in school and haven't thought about them for a while, but really they're too, they're quite pessimistic and critical novels, right? They're pretty good at very good at picking apart the problems with socialist dictatorship and the idea that absolute power crops absolutely and the kind of neat caution against that. But what they aren't very good at is offering a constructive alternative. And Orwell is really more of a critic than a policy planner, right? And the one exception arguably is line in the unicorn, which is written early in the First World War during the Blitz, you know, at this period when Orwell truly believes that a social revolution is going to have to take place in Britain in order for Britain to be able to hold together and to defeat Nazism. And he is very much an active anti-fascist throughout his career. Something maybe we can talk about later if we have the time. But, you know, in it, he has this blueprint for social revolution, which really emphasizes both the importance of economic equality. And he, you know, during the Second World War, he does use the phrase the 1%, right, you know, which has entered common parlance in the last few years to talk about the elite. And, you know, he says that people actually, that incomes need to be limited so that the highest, you know, amongst society are no more than 10 times that of the humblest, which is, of course, not the case really anywhere in the West, in the present age, nor was it the case at his time. And so he's making an argument for the importance of kind of economic bubbling, but also for broader social leveling, that really if the snobberies and class prejudices and divisions within society, and here he includes and really emphasizes the divisions in the way that people are educated and calls for the abolition of private schools, something as we are in the midst of our current debate about VAT on private schooling, you know, those resonances echo. Despite having been privately educated, he believes that private schooling is a corrosive, you know, tool of social differentiation, and that really there's an importance of Britain is going to achieve some kind of better society and effectively defeat Nazism of breaking down those economic and class barriers that separate the British people. And of course he's ultimately proved wrong, right? You know, Britain does come through victorious in the Second World War. And it is true, as I discussed in the book, that the atly government that's elected after the war does, you know, attempt a significant degree of social redistribution, but we come nowhere close to the world that Orwell is proposing in the line in the unicorn, right? Private schools are left untouched by the atly administration. I've written another book on Ellen Wilkinson. He was at least first Minister of Education and one of the real posthumous debates surrounding her tenure there, whereas her decision not to touch private schooling, but also while progressive taxation and nationalization are introduced, and both of those were things that Orwell advocated, that level of social leveling never comes into being in Britain, nor anywhere else in the West. And so the emergence of welfare states was something that Orwell supported, but you know, by the mid-1940s, he's already recognizing that the welfare states that are emerging across the West after World War II are not going as far in terms of a real social revolution that he had hoped to see, and that instead what you're getting is a kind of bureaucratic state, and an expanding state sector, but not necessarily a kind of true revolution. And in some ways, 1984, which is set in London and the ruling government, Inksok, is short for English socialism. It's meant to be an English socialist administration, right? But it's more of a kind of power consolidating bureaucratic regime than it is a truly communitarian and redistributive regime. And that is, you know, he's not critiquing his socials and per se, he identifies as a socialist until his death. But he's critiquing that kind of limited idea of socialism that is about bureaucracy and centralization and state power as opposed to about real both social and economic change within a broader society. - I mean, you mentioned like so many more things we could have talked about, I see, you know, it's almost kind of strange to be talking about Orwell and not talk about things like his like active, like literal active service against fascism in Spain, you know, as well as the kind of circumstances of his death and how this kind of shapes, you know, his final bits of writing. But I suppose that's something that people can kind of dip into the book, you know, and they can kind of get the sense of how much more both, you know, Orwell's kind of life is about and also the book covers. To wrap up though, I'm sort of intrigued by what you're going to do kind of next after this book, partially because, you know, you mentioned having taught a course on Orwell, you also mentioned, you know, your other work looking at Britain in the 1940s and the kind of impact of things like the early government. And I'm intrigued by whether, you know, this kind of more Orwell in your future or whether you're thinking in terms of, I suppose, doing a kind of a different research project, a different bit of historical political work. - Well, I mean, Orwell will always be with me. I think one of the things about my writing is if you go back and look at any of my books, either edited or so authored, you know, an oral quotation makes it into all of them because he, I think, has so much relevance to how we understand both the past and the present. But I'm not intending to stick with Orwell through the future. I think when you first introduced the book, you said it was this kind of hybrid of, you know, politics and history and contemporary commentary. And I think that really encapsulates how I think of myself as a scholar. I am a trained as a historian and I'm a historian, but I'm very interested in the relevance of history to our contemporary moment. And so the project I'm working on now deals with reproductive politics. And so it's closest link is probably to the gender chapter in Orwell. But thinking about how discussions around artificial reproduction, so surrogacy and IVF, an artificial insemination and egg freezing, which are technologies that are approaching their 50th anniversary. The first IVF baby is actually born in Britain in Oldham in 1978. But how those technologies have been politicized and contested within contemporary society, not just in Britain, but throughout the West. And obviously for those of you who keep an eye on American politics, those are in the aftermath of Dobbs and in the context of the current US election, very much live political questions at the moment. But I'm interested in how they've evolved over the 50 years since the advent of IVF. So in some ways in a very different vein, but if you look at the body of my scholarship, the intersections between politics and feminist politics in particular and society more broadly, is something that I've long been interested in. So it's picking back up with that thread. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)
