George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton and became a policeman in Burma. After leaving the police, he began to investigate the poverty in India and Europe which shaped his thinking about equality, money and power. His great works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are a product of his hatred of totalitarianism in all its forms and he was as critical of Stalin in the 1930s as he was ready to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. His legacy of writing and political thought is much admired today. He died of tuberculosis in 1950.

John Sutherland is the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature, UCL, and has taught at the University of Edinburgh and the California Institute of Technology. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature he is the author of many books and articles including the well-received Orwell's Nose: A Pathological Biography in 2016 and Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004).