Today I talk to Liam Knight, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham working on a thesis addressing the question of 'endotextuality' in dystopian fiction. We talk about books within books and texts within texts, focusing on Orwell but with an eye on some other dystopian writers, including Margaret Atwood. In addition to his PhD research, Liam runs a brilliant GCSE revision resource, 'Dystopia Junkie', which you can find on YouTube.

A conversation with Professor John Bowen, about his recent experience of editing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) for the Oxford World's Classics series.

A conversation with Dr Lisa Mullen about Homage to Catalonia (1938) and the annotated edition of it she recently produced for the Oxford World's Classics series.

Is Nineteen Eighty-Four a love story? In this episode, we consider how love survives, to a degree, while also being twisted into new, disturbing forms in Orwell's imagined future of pain and terror.

George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, combines a sceptical view of the nostalgic with dread about a looming future of pain and suffering. This episode looks at how these emphases are bound up with the first-person narration of George Bowling, whose disreputability and misogyny makes him a compromised 'voice' for the modern world.

Orwell's mud. Homage to Catalonia shows how Orwell could turn the muddying of troops and the muddied waters of civil war into impressionistic form. This episode reconstructs these emphases, connecting them to Orwell's reasons for participating in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

An episode considering how Orwell's most famous satire, Animal Farm, traces the equivalences between men and animals as part of its fairy-tale response to the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Stalin's Russia.

Is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) socio-economically voyeuristic? This episode discusses some of the issues surrounding this and related questions, giving an overview of why and how Orwell wrote this enduringly relevant account of poverty and hardship in the industrial north of England.

An episode about Orwell's least well-known novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), in which images of glue and stickiness denote the text's very particular concern with returns back to the normal and familiar.

Orwell's novel Burmese Days (1934) takes a dim view of empire, but is itself deeply prejudiced. This episode considers prejudice at two levels: the racist mentalities of the Orwell's characters, and the novel's own narrative expressions of lookism and fat-shaming.