Robert Colls on George Orwell: Life and Legacy with John Gray

Join Robert Colls to celebrate his latest publication- George Orwell: Life and Legacy. This event will be chaired by John Gray, author of Feline Philosophy and The New Leviathans.

George Orwell has never been more quoted and misquoted; he 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.

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.

John Gray portrait credit Justine Stoddart