Robert Colls in conversation with Ronald Binns: George Orwell @ Southwold Literary Festival

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

Ronald Binns is the author of three biographical books: “Orwell in Southwold”, “Gascoigne: The Life of a Tudor Poet”, and “Elizabeth, Shakespeare and the Castle: The Story of the Kenilworth Revels”.

George Orwell has never been more quoted & misquoted. Can he be rescued from the soundbites? George Orwell remains a work in progress. “George Orwell: Life and Legacy” is an intellectual biography which offers an original account of Orwell's life & 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. Orwell's life played out against a background of two world wars, two great revolutions, one long global depression, the rise & rise of Communism, & the war-time pre-eminence of the United States. Yet no matter how alert he was to all these great struggles, & no matter how guarded he was in his personal life, Orwell never turned away from the question of who he was, & the contradictions that entailed. His two great modern masterpieces “Animal Farm” & “Nineteen Eighty-Four” 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.

Unreserved seating.