George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton, became a policeman in Burma but suffered and studied poverty. His great works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are a product of his hatred of totalitarianism. His legacy of writing and political thought is much admired today.

Richard Bradford (Introduction) is Research Professor at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at Avignon University. He has held posts at Oxford, the University of Wales and Trinity College, Dublin, and has published thirty-five books. Ten of these are literary biographies, including lives of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Amis, Ernest Hemingway, John Milton and most recently the widely-acclaimed Orwell: A Man of Our Time (2020). His life of Patricia Highsmith will appear on the centenary of her birth in 2021.

D.J. Taylor (Foreword) is the author of Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003, as well as the acclaimed biography Thackeray (1999). The most recent of his eleven novels are The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, Derby Day (2011), At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006). Also well known as a critic and reviewer, David has published books on British fiction and writes for many UK and US newspapers and publications.