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Podcast: New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episode: Douglas Kerr, "Orwell and Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Description: George Orwell was born in India and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. Douglas Kerr's book Orwell and Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of his writing about the East and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognized, in shaping the writer he became.Orwell and Empire is about all his writings, fictional and non-fictional. It pays particular attention to work that derives directly from his Bur...