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305. Orwell: Dark Secrets, The CIA, & His Forgotten Failures (Part 4)
In this episode of 'Empire,' hosts Anita Arnon and William Turimple delve into the life and legacy of George Orwell, exploring his struggles with tuberculosis, his final days, and the comple...
305. Orwell: Dark Secrets, The CIA, & His Forgotten Failures (Part 4)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.
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And me, William Turimple.
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We are so excited because we have feminist icon who's written the most brilliant book to
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talk about this the fourth episode in our all well series. Anna Funda is here and she
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has written the most sublime book and I just commended all to you. Wifedon misses all
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well's invisible life and it really does so much to turn everything you think you know
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about all well on its head then put its hand down its throat then turn it inside out
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and then waggle it around in the air and a funder. Welcome. Thank you so much.
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I've been keeping you to a part deliberately for months now. The two of you together would
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be an impossible, an impossible chemistry. Anyway, we'll see it in the next 40 minutes.
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It's going to happen in the next 40 minutes. There's also going to happen when Anna comes
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to London. We're going to paint the town. Very bright pink. Okay, painting the town pink
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for another time. Let's start there with something where black would be a more appropriate
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color and this is weird to start a podcast with somebody dying but that's where we've
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got to in the chronology of the story. And so we want to talk about the end of all well's
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life and let's talk about TB because it was such a massive factor in the decline of
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a great writer. Well, all well actually had terrible lungs all his life. Even when he
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was a two year old, I went to the archives and opened up his mother's diary and his mother
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was this very lively woman who was bored to sobs although she loved her children and she
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filled her diary with entries that just said nothing in cursive and the next day nothing.
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And then there was baby's chest bad and then there was baby's first word quote, beastly
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end quote. So I think all of that says a lot about all well. He had very bad chest. He
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had TB basically all his adult life as far as anyone can tell. And yes, beastly was a
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prominent part of his vocabulary and arsenal. And for someone who had a bad chest,
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presumably moving to the West Highland Island of jurors, not going to improve things.
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You know, it gets when it rains on 365 days a year and is damp 365 days a year. Do you know,
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I think there was some, I don't know where this is actually true, but it was said that it had a
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lovely microclimate. And we're talking about immediate post war, London, which is a hellscape,
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you know, you can barely find enough wood to heat your room and there are blackouts and it's
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miserable and the food is terrible. Bomb sites everywhere. Bomb sites, just awful. For them both to
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move to juror and it sounded like a kind of paradise of, you know, a sea full of fish and lobsters
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and a place to plant your greens and very, very isolated, but also quite healthy. So he was hopeful
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when he went. Yeah, but I mean, he didn't help himself because he still chainsmoking at this point.
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He's sort of working himself to distraction. I mean, he's sort of, you know, trying to finish
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the final draft of 1984. If he's working by night, he's got a path in lamp on. So, you know, whatever,
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whatever the health benefits of being in the clear sea air are in the evening, you know,
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it's all undone by the horrible smog coming off the lamp studies working with. Oh, I know. I've
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been in that room where he wrote 1984 and I have to say at the end of writing it, he had to
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type out a fair copy himself. Normally, Eileen would have done it, but she wasn't available,
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obviously. And his editor and his friend Richard Reese and Fred Warburg tried really, really hard,
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to get a woman to go to Jura from London to do that typing and to make a fair copy for him,
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but no one would go. I mean, to get there from London was a 48 hour trip. Yeah, even today,
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it's quite a, it's quite a trip to get to Jura. I've been to Jura, but I've also been to the Sanatorium
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at Wirdley in the Cotswills where he was taken when he collapsed. It's on the edge of this lovely,
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you know, sort of perfect Cotswil territory. It's also quite bleak. You can imagine that it wasn't
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going to be a very cheery spot to recover, but they didn't keep him there long, did they? They
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moved him to, was the University College Hospital in London. So he actually, he typed out this
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manuscript in this tiny room with a dormal window at Boundhill on Jura looking out over the sea.
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And he changed smoke, as you say, in the paraphernal app was going, and he refused all medical attention.
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So he's sort of coughing up his lungs, but really killing himself to get this book done, to get
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1984 done, and would only let a doctor have a look at him once that was typed. So he sort of
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was suffering for his art in this most extreme of ways. And yes, then the Cotswills and then a
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tiny room at UCL in London where his friends could visit him. So, you know, David Astor could visit
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and people were coming by. And where David Astor visited him in the unusual circumstances of
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actually marrying for the second time in hospital in bed. And for those who aren't familiar with the
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name David Astor was one of the great heirs of a fortune in post-war Britain who lived, I think,
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in Cliveden, which was a great sort of post-war literary salon and political salon. And he owned
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the observer, which was the leading left-leaning newspaper of the day. Yes. So Sonia went to see him when
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he was in the Cotswills, Sonia Brownell. And she was this gorgeous, vivacious, very clever woman
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who'd been an editor at Horizon magazine. Gone off to France had a fairly disastrous in the end
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intense affair with the philosopher Maurice Mellow-Porty. And then come back and decided that she would
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go and visit all well. They'd had a kind of very, very brief liaison before. But she went to see
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him in the Cotswills and then she started bringing him books, whiskey, newspapers and doing bits and
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his vim. And he was bizzottes and asked her to marry him. And Horizon was closing up and she said
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to a friend, well, Horizon's closing up, I think, on Mary Orwell. And she did. But they married
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literally on his deathbed at University College Hospital. There's a wonderful description of that
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marriage at the opening of DJ Taylor's book which I know you have all differences with, but it's
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a wonderful description of these strange figures meeting in this bleak hospital. But Orwell himself
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like a lot of dying people, I think. I have not very much experience of this, but some. And you know,
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they keep alive by hoping that they will be able to keep alive even though rationally and reasonably,
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I mean, Orwell said, for instance, they can barely find enough flesh on me to stick an injection
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into. I'm basically a corpse. But at the same time, he kept a fishing rod handy in the corner of
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this tiny room because the plan was that he would go to Switzerland where the air was even better
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for some of our tuberculosis, even in the end stage. And he would fish. That plan was organized by
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Sonja because Orwell wanted it with an ex lover of hers, Lucian Freud, very young Lucian Freud,
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who was going to do literally the heavy lifting of getting Orwell onto a plane that was being
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chartered to take him to Switzerland. So the fishing rod was the kind of simple of hope, I think,
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against hope literally in that room. He never made it to Switzerland. So he never made it to Switzerland.
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His friends have accepted that he may not last very long. Is there a point where he does suddenly
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think, actually, I really don't, I'm never going to go fishing. I'm never going to use that rod. And
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as he stopped preparing for death because we know he had meetings with accountants and lawyers and
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that almost the last week of his life. So something in him must have, you know, whatever the outside
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waiters and paraphernalia were in his room known that this, you know, this he wasn't going to get out
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of this. Maybe yes. When he was proposing to Sonja and he proposed to numbers of women before
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he proposed to Sonja, he did say really what I'm asking you to be is the executrix of a literary man.
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So he'd had one wife who looked after his affairs, co-wrote animal farm, edited everything that he
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did. No, I got quite a bit. Well, come to that in a minute. Okay. And then there's a woman at the end.
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Yeah. He's had one brilliant literary wife and he wants another who won't be a wife of making books,
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but he'll be a wife of looking after his legacy. So yes, there was this cognitive dissonance going on,
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which I find totally understandable and utterly heartbreaking. She did guard his legacy though,
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didn't she? She was, she seems sort of fended off David Bowie who wanted to make a 1984 musical,
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which must be one of the great sort of misses of modern artistic history. I didn't know that.
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That's an amazing idea. You've just blown my mind. Just, I mean, let's talk about actually, you know,
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the day that he died because I think one of the last friends I went with, this is 1949,
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just to remind people where we are in this great life. One of the last friends to see him alive was
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the anarchist poet Paul Potts. And I mean, that's a very sweet visit, isn't it? Sort of brings
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him tea. Tick-a-brand of tea that he loved. Yes, he loved Indian tea. He didn't want that Chinese
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filthy stuff. And Paul Potts, who was always broke, you know, always scrounging for money in pubs,
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managed to find him some tea and buy it. But then he comes to the door of the hospital and he
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looks and he sees that all world is asleep and thinks I'll just leave the tea. And he regretted
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it afterwards because all world died very shortly after the massive hemorrhage. So is that,
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is that something that happens with TB? Is that just some blood vessels just burst? I'm no TB
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expert, but I think that you really just, he'd had several hemorrhages before and this was just
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a massive one that he couldn't survive. I mean, TB's very unusual disease to have today. It wasn't
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unusual after the war where many people died up to me. It was he particularly unlucky with his
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right delicate test. I've got this terrible disease. Well, actually, he was particularly unlucky in
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the timing of it because shortly after that in the early 50s antibiotic treatments came in that
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were effective against TB. So after, you know, sort of a tragic awful end for a man who was just
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so gigantic in so many ways, frail, you know, with not enough flesh to put a needle in. We should
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talk about his legacy. And one of the weirdest ironies, I think, that, you know, that he is known as
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this lifelong democratic socialist. And yet, one of the first groups to move in on him and his
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legacy is the CIA. So the CIA's office of policy coordination, the OPC secretly obtained the
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film rights to animal farm. And they produced a slightly baudularized version that was far more
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to the right than the original novel was slightly to the right. They were just bloody nonsense.
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They made the pigs look like humans because they thought actually if people think that the capitalists
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are pigs, they won't like capitalism anymore. On that very basic level of nonsense meddling
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that they managed to sort of get hold of it. So, you know, that this massively anti-communist message
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gets completely sort of mishmashed until you don't really know what it is. It's bad farming
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practices, you know, it's a really ridiculous situation. But it's become thanks to the CIA partly,
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the classic anti-communist text now that's used in schools in Britain and all over the world.
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It isn't just a British and American thing. People I remember when Mugabe was going down,
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we're comparing him to Napoleon the big animal farm and Ditto in Burma when you travel in
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Burma. People think that animal farmers are Burmese folk all about Burma. We've talked earlier,
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and one of the earlier episodes about how they literally read it as a Burmese political text
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to this day. There's also just the enormous irony of the fact that in 1984 he talks about these
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supreme powers rewriting history to suit their own narrative. And that's precisely what the CIA
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tries to do to animal farm. I think it's just hilarious to be honest. But let's get back to Anna
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and her brilliant book, Wyfton. I mean, one of the themes of this mini series has been the sense in
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which all almost alone of his generation, particularly alone of the sort of Etonian writers
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like sort of Robert Byron and all those all this Huxley and all those figures that came out of
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the British establishment in the 20s and 30s, alone of those all will is prescient and reads today
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as if he's talking to us. The others seem locked in a period of history. And whether we're talking
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about all those views of empire or all those views of fascism or all those views of communism,
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a he is someone that speaks directly to us today. We don't need to sort of see him
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for much of his career as a man of his time. But this is emphatically not the case
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with all those views of women. And Anna has written this wonderful book. Can I just say,
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are any of our members of our club can get discounts to this wonderful book? Could just sign up
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at empirepoduk.com, that's empirepoduk.com. And you can get Anna's book at a discount.
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And it's worth twice as much as you'd pay for it. Let's talk about the story. I've been
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willing with saying that everybody's sort of poured over all else life and his motivations
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and what did he really mean. But that part of his life that was inhabited by really important
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women, that is almost deleted. Now I want to know when you first realized that this was a,
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you know, this was ground worth telling. I will absolutely tell you when I first realized.
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But first one I just want to talk about what Willie said. The thing about all well having a
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different view from his Etonian contemporaries is such an interesting way to cast this question
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because he was only really by the skin of his teeth and Etonian at all. His mother who was
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half French and grew up in Burma had intellectual interests, was very clever, lively, feminist,
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fabian socialist. So all well had this extraordinary, lively intellectual feminist mother and
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aunt. So her sister had been arrested with the pancreas for demonstrating for suffrage,
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was an Esperantist, lived in scene quote unquote with a French anti-style and as leftist in Paris,
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was an actress, used to correspond with all well, sending him stuff about the latest research into
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sex and gender roles. These were really interesting women. The family has no money basically.
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Ida, his mother, sends all well to a crammer and at 11 he gets into Eton. But they are really
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cash-strap. All well used to famously say he came from the lower upper middle class.
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That sounds like understatement. It sounds like a quite charming thing to say I'm from the lower
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upper middle. But I went to the house which was the first house his parents actually owned,
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I believe in retirement in Southworld, coastal community full of sort of mid-level ex civil servants
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of empire. And the opening scene of the book Wifem is Eileen writing a letter to her best friend.
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I used the real letter she wrote to her best friend Nora from their time at Oxford together.
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And she says, I'm surprised that I'm having such a good time. The house is very small and furnished
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almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. So she manages to get in this very funny way,
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the sort of former glory of the family and the portraits of ancestors in this tiny house.
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I thought nothing of it, but a very kind man got me into that house when I was on a book tour and
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did a reading in Southworld and it is a tiny house. It is a tiny house. So all well has two things
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that mark him out as different perhaps from his generation. He has this terrific Etonian education
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although he didn't really shine there, but he also has this underdog outside a view
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which is a leftist view and that comes from feminist mother and aunt, a left-wing underdog.
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And I don't think many other old Etonians had left-wing feminist parents who gave them that
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particularly underdog or well-in-pointed view. And he got that from women.
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Yeah, I mean I'm just really interested them with you know a suffrageite leaning mother.
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And that sort of strong sense of social justice that he has. Why does he write such weird stuff
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about women? Because I think six months into your project of writing this book, you find an essay
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written by, well can I quote a bit of it to you and then just explain what was going on in that head
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at the time. There were two great facts about women which you could only learn by getting married
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right, so well. And which flatly contradict the picture of themselves that women had managed to
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impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidyness. The other was their
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terrible devouring sexuality. Without any marriage or regular love affair, he suspected that it was
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always the women who were the sexually insistent partners. And you go on to say you know that he
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has a real hang up about women being these voracious kind of monsters who want more and more sex. And
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the men sort of have to cope with this and navigate it. It's not the most flattering portrait of
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strong women. Yes, no, it's not. I mean there's a lot of evidence that all world was gay, that his real
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desire was for other men. He did do a lot of what the biographers, some of them euphemise as
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bouncing on women before and during his marriage or during sometimes women he knew, sometimes
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women he paid for sex, sometimes women in parks or after parties or whatever. So there was a lot
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of sexual assault. I am looking at what the women said. So the women he pounced on said. And at that time
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in the 20s, 30s, 40s, nobody was talking using language of sexual assault. And I don't think women
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were often saying that they had been raped, but they were shocked, they were surprised, they were
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appalled, they ran away. One woman he jumped on in a park after a party hamstered. He jumped on her
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and she fought him off by negotiating to meet him the next day. She was a young woman he had met
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once before. He'd worked at the BBC. So she manages to get away, but it's a physical attack.
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And she makes this promise. And of course she doesn't turn up for a repeat performance in the park
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the next day, whereupon he writes her a letter about the iniquity of breaking your promise to come
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back for another sexual assault. So there's a lot of evidence about his desire for men and there's
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a lot of evidence that we would say today's sexual assault. Could you go into the first a bit more?
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Because I mean, obviously a lot of his contemporaries from that generation were gay, wasn't
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it all unusual? Yes. For public school educated boys of that generation to be very openly gay.
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And many of the writers of his era were openly gay, but he wasn't openly gay, was he?
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I mean, I've looked at it quite closely because I was writing about it and I didn't want to
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get anything wrong or smear anybody in any way. He was enormously homophobic, which was also
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very common at that time, but also very common. So you've got these contradictions. So he was in
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love with somebody, another boy at school, which I'm sure was very common. He wrote letters to
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Cyril Connolly. He was in his form saying, please leave him to me and so on. And then you know,
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there was sort of strip searching of 16 year old Spanish recruits. There was a young man called
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Denzel, who was in the Dad's Army during the war, who he nearly blew his teeth out with a mortar
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and then plight him with whiskey and took him off to the movies. And David Taylor actually says,
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and behind that looks the shadow of the dark horse. So I have to say every time one of the
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ographers kind of goes into murky language, murky euphemistic language, it's often about something
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sexual. I don't know where the David knows where that all-wells homosexual desires were ever
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fulfilled. I suspect they weren't. I think that he was extremely conflicted in a way that
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couldn't come to the surface of his consciousness. So one of his friends, after all-well died,
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said a bit like what you're saying, Willie, I actually really never understood why he was so
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homophobic, because when we were younger, those of us who loved the workers did it practically.
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Meaning we would have just slept with them. So there was a tradition of kind of, well really
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of sex tourism within Britain, kind of going into the east end or going up north or whatever.
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Or well, I don't think he was doing that when he was in the kips and around the place, but I don't
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know. And there's a great deal of this also on the British left at this time, in particular,
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if you think of all those those Cambridge spies and so on. Almost all were bisexual or gay.
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Do you know the thing is, I don't think this was a deliberate choice. I mean, I think that
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in his family, I don't think that his mother and aunts, who were his intellectual and political
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load stars, would have blinked if he were gay. There was no sign that I mean, there were very
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kind of sexually open-minded. So his best friend was Richard Reese, who was never married. So the left
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wing of Mr. Cratt, who had been an editor of Orwells and was very wealthy, followed him into the
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health in the end of it. So he had this very close editor and friend, bachelor friend.
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But really, as a gay man, even though you might be much happier out at that time, if you had no money,
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you wouldn't never be able to afford the services, thinking practically, that a wife would give
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you, particularly a brilliant wife like Eileen. So to live how he lived with a domestic servant and
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Oxford educated brilliant writer, editor, wife, would just not be possible as a gay man. So this
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set as well, I think. Well, look, we're going to take a break here. We're going to come back and talk
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more about Eileen, who is just such a fascinating character. But I'll just leave you with a couple
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of lines before we go to that break. And again, this is from that same essay that Orwell writes,
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which we think is about Eileen. And again, it's about sex. So we're talking about sex a lot,
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a lot more than I thought we would in this episode. But he talks again about sort of sexual
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intercourse. And the fact that men are pushed, men are trying to escape from sexual intercourse.
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So when they do it, when they feel like it with other women, and the women are demanding it more
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and more, he says, and more and more consciously despising their husbands for lack of virility.
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Join us after the break where we find out how this fits in with Eileen, who really, I think,
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is there better? Hello, I'm David Olishoggan. And I'm Sarah Churchill. This week on Journey Through Time,
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we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics
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engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history.
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The plan was ruthless, blow up Parliament, King James I, and most of his family, all in a single blow.
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The series will tell the story of treason and traitors, of a group of men led by the charismatic
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Robert Catesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics
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with the violent destruction of the Stuart state. We look at the story of Guy Fox, the nation's
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most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being
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tortured and killed. Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, four hundred
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years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. And as a special treat for
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listeners, we've got an extract from that series at the end of this episode.
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Welcome back. So just before the break, we started talking about Eileen, who was the woman who
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does a lot of work who actually sort of going to gave up her own career in order to support all
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well in his. And I think first of all, we should say what she did before and what she ends up doing
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after she gets with all well. Can you talk us through that Anna? And we should describe her first
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of all. She's got this lovely open face that the picture, which very cleverly in your front
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cover is moved almost off of center. So you can barely see her face. When you see the actual picture,
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she's got this open face. She's got her rather a sort of boyish beautifulness about her with this
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little bob of hair. And she's of Irish background, isn't she? Eileen more doxanasi, but born in
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sad seals run the numbers. Yes, she's she's she's often described as very as beautiful. It's a very
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open face. She was somebody who didn't use any makeup. She only used rouge. And when one of her
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friends asked her, do you really have to put that on? She said, I only put it on really for other
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people otherwise, they'd worry about me because I look like I'm about to pass out. She's very
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pale with very dark hair and blue or green eyes, quite pale, tallish and thin. One of her friends
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said, she had a lot of lovely friends. When she met all well, she met they met at a party in
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hamstered. And it was a party at the flat of a woman who was a divorced South African woman
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who was studying for a masters in psychology. And so was Eileen. So she was a a UCL
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college friend of Eileen's and a violin friend, Lydia. So this milieu is of these women in the
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30s Eileen having done red English at Oxford. And first generation of Oxford women, we should say,
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she's one of the very first in there at the time when male undergraduates are often very disparaging
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about what they would call blue stockings in the literature at the time. And there's rather a
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fear of these brilliant women among the young men at Oxford. They avoided relationships with the
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women and often had relationships with each other. Suddenly, you know, the evil wars of this world.
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Goodness, there's a lot of terror of clever women, isn't there? Yeah.
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Well, thank goodness that's all changed, Anna. And that's not a thing anymore.
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So Eileen came from this apparently quote, mad gay family. Her dad was a customs inspector.
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They had quite a bit of money, a lot more than Orwell's family. She had an elder brother who was
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completely brilliant, lung and thoracic surgeon who went to study in Berlin under the surgeon who'd
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had been Hitler's doctor and stuff. Her brother became an anti-fascist and Eileen who was also
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brilliant and got herself a scholarship. She was head girl at her school, got herself a scholarship
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to Oxford to read English. She was funny. I was taught by Tolkien. Tolkien was her. Yeah.
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Tolkien was her professor. I mean, that's amazing. Yes. Yes, it is. So she loved animal fables.
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When she was first married to Orwell, they lived in a tiny hovel in a village called Wallington,
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50 miles outside of London with no plumbing and no electricity. So they were kind of both
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suffering for his art, really. She wrote in her first letter to Nora. She said, I'm really sorry,
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it's taken me six months to write to you. I would have written sooner, but we have quarreled
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so continuously and really bitterly since the wedding, but I thought I'd just write one letter to
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everyone once the murder or separation was accomplished. So she's hilarious. And these letters were
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discovered in about 2005, a case of six of them to her best friend. And my interest in Eileen was
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really that I found myself one summer kind of needing inspiration and I've always loved Orwell
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his work. I didn't read 1984 till after I'd written Star Zealand for some reason. I just really didn't
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want to. And then when I read it, it read like the GDR regime. So I read my way through his collected
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journalism essays and letters and watched him create his writing persona through those four
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edited volumes edited by Sonja Brownell with another. And then when I finished that, I read the six
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biographies of him with great pleasure. You get these different views on the same person,
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depending on the personality of the biographer. And then I was still researching around and found
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these letters that I, not me personally, they had been found that they were six letters from Eileen
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to her best friend starting with this one where she wants to kill him at six months married. And
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I realized that there was no sense of her as a person and what she'd done in the biographies.
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And it's actually not because these six letters were missing. It's because the men who wrote the
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biographies were not looking. And also all world didn't help either because he sort of emits her.
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But look, we jumped to step because we started off saying they met at a party. We need to know whether
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it was love at first sight. And then William sort of left in with the description. We need to know
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what happened, where their fireworks. How did it develop? It was absolutely love at first sight for him.
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He was besotted and he thought this was the woman for him. She said the next day, she'd never heard
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of him. He was a complete unknown. He and Richard Reese were leaning on the fireplace in their
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threadbare suits, skinny men, looking as Eileen's friend Lydia said rather moth eaten. Lydia was Russian,
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thought they looked like some sort of moth eaten people out of check off and didn't want Eileen to
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have anything to do with him. Eileen the next day said to a friend, Rosemund, who was the hostess,
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said actually he would really like to see you. Should I organize a dinner? And Eileen was surprised
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and said, oh my god, I was so drunk, rowdy behaving my worst. So Eileen had had a good time. All
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will had fallen in love. Rosemund organized a dinner and it went from there. So he, yeah, and then
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they married the next year. And so I mean, there's this bright, wonderful woman who, you know, has
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has the eyes of everybody in the room on her because she has got this sort of this Irish beauty,
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you know, the green blue sea eyes and the, you know, the dark hair and the translucent skin.
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How quickly does she start changing from her own woman, a very strong educated,
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talking, taught woman into somebody who thinks that actually, you know, this man is worth me
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diverting my energies, my talent, my intelligence to serve him in a way, to help him, to make him better.
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That's a really brilliant question. And that is the question, I think one of the big questions of
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my book, Wifedom. And it's a question for many women who go into marriage or go into relationships.
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It's a question of how much of yourself can you maintain in a relationship? How much should you
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give in that relationship? And negotiating those two sometimes conflicting things. And sometimes if
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you give too much, it can be too late to get yourself back because you give so much, you end up
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in a state where you no longer have the strength to get yourself back whole. So something like that
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is going on in this marriage, but it's a complicated and interesting one. Three weeks after the party,
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she said to Fred Lydia, you know, that Malthietian guy at the party, well, he asked me to marry him.
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And Lydia says, she writes us in her memoir, Lydia, so we know it. Oh my god, no, oh god, what did you
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say? And Eileen says, well, you know, I said to myself, if I weren't married by the time I was 30,
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I'd marry the first person who comes along. So maybe I will. So she's kind of having a bet with
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herself. But I think she was being kind of humorous there. What I really think was going on was at
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Oxford, she would have liked to have stayed and become a dawn of some kind. It was pretty much
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impossible for women to do. And she didn't get a first. Eileen was the most self-deprecating to a
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dangerous degree person combined with this extraordinary cleverness. And the only time in her life
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where she behaves in such a disappointed way, almost embedded is when she didn't get a first at
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Oxford. And I suspect that something happened there that she thought was unfair. She had a great
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sense of justice. She organized two war counts of workers at Secretary of Officers that she'd
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worked in, actually won during the war at a ministry. She had a great sense of decency that was the
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decency that all well so wanted to have. And I think that he, you know, he modeled that decency on
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her. But yes, the issue of losing yourself in America is a big one. And I don't know, I just have
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to give all the evidence until the story. So this, this strong, brilliant, beautiful woman,
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who also sort of proves her metal in that cauldron of the Spanish Civil War. Just tell us what Eileen
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was doing at that time. And so, all well goes to Spain to fight fascists. He wants to fight and kill
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fascists. Something that you know used to seem like it was history and doesn't anymore. But that's
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what he's doing. And he leaves her in this tiny cottage. And I think that she just thinks, no,
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why am I staying here looking after the chickens. And she sells part of the family silver to fund
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his kit. But also she manages to get herself a job in the head office of the International Labour
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Party in Barcelona. So she goes as a French English typist and she's writing propaganda for
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Charles Orr, who's an American economist in that office. So she's working at the political
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headquarters and he's often the trenches brought out of his mind trying to find a bullet to hit him
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basically. So she goes there. And so she saves his life when he's hit by a bullet. She saves his
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life by getting the visas to get them out of Spain. He's writing on bits of newspaper in these
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horrible trenches and the backs of envelopes and toilet paper and everything. And he's standing
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at back to her and she types it all up into what will become the basis for Amish de Catalunya,
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a book that I had read twice and loved without realizing that Eileen was in Spain. Let alone
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had saved his life and basically her political analysis informing that book. She must have typed
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that and realized in the typing of it that he was going to very deliberately tell the story to
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leave her out. But why did he do that Anna? As somebody who's thought about him. Why do that?
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It's so churlish. It's churlish to the point of being actually quite cruel, isn't it?
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It's very deliberate. So he has to tell the whole story of being shot through the throat without
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saying that within a day basically or day and a half she was there and she organized all medical
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care x-rays all the transport, put him in the sanatorium. There's that. And then there's the
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episode when Stalin could see her perfectly clearly. There were Stalinist agents in her office
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who wanted to wine and dine her, romance her, get information from her. She was a target.
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She was terrified. When Richard Reese or Wells friend turns up in Barcelona he goes to see her
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at the office and says let's go to lunch and she says I can't and he says oh come on you can just
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get away for an hour and she says takes him into the corridor because there literally spies in
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her office spying for Stalin and says it will be dangerous for you Richard to be seen with me.
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And he writes down which all the biographers had access to. This is the first time I have witnessed
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somebody living under political terror. Political terror is all Wells's topic. She was the one who
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lived it and so she was informing his books with it. I think the big answer to your question why
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would he do that? Is it churlish? I think that I mean it's very deliberate. I see it more as something
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that is a cultural trope. All kinds of men are writing their stories as if women didn't make them
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possible. The fact that none of the biographers thought to look closely at this very famous episode,
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this very famous man, this very famous book and deconstructed to see what is being hidden.
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I mean I've done that that sounds complicated but I've done it in a narrative way in Waivedom.
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It's a shock to me that all well scholars who are much more informed than I am didn't do that.
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I mean it's really exciting. It's Shashila Fum who saved his life and made this book possible
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and yet she's nowhere. So I think that the biographers are also part of this trope where a great man
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must do everything on his own and he must not owe anything to a woman because that could possibly
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take away from his achievement. I don't think it does. I think the story is much more interesting
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when you can see both sides. And tell us about her literary additions to his herb because from
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the very beginning from Wigan Pier which has been written just as the early days of their marriage.
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She is not only typing stuff out but she is editing and contributing to his literary work.
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That's one of the great revelations of your book not only is she humanly in the story much more
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than the other biographers have allowed her up to date but she's actually a major literary presence
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which is a very important literary contribution that you've made by unmasking this.
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Yes so just after they were married in 1936 several people who knew him well including
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Richard Wiesen, Fred Warburg who were editors and publishers of his said it was remarkable
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how much his writing improved after he got married but they too wouldn't name her. It was as if
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perhaps his happiness in general, perhaps regular sex. There's all these sort of theories.
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It was obviously because she had started. He was reluctant at first but she was very keen to
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edit his stuff. Eventually she ended up writing what she called emendations on the back of everything
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that he did. She was widely thought by her friends to have improved his work by raining in the
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paranoia, raining in the sadism, raining in the hyperbole, all tobacco nests of fascists.
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Oh that's just, I love that one. They sort of provoke provocations that could make you
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writing a bit less serious. Can we just zone in on animal farm which is a book that I think most
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people listening to this will have either been forced to read at school or like me really enjoyed
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reading at school. Ileens fingerprints are all over that and you just wouldn't know it would
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you. So tell me what she did. Tell me how that is a clear bit of evidence of her impact on his
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work. Animal Farm was written during the war or well since their time in Spain really had been
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terrified as stylists was going to come and kill him. A real terror but a very unlikely thing to
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happen because he had been a pretty low level militia man but he thought that someone might knock
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on the door in in Britain and have been sent by stylists to kill him. In fact when that did happen
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one time he grabbed a gun in the cottage, jumped behind the door and said to Ileen, open the door.
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Anyway he decides during the war he wants to write an essay critical of Stalin. Ileen always
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worked to support them financially during their whole relationship. One of the jobs that she did
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that in was in the office of censorship in the Department of Information or vice versa. Department
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of censorship in the Office of Information. So she had been in the Department of censorship during
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the war working there. Which is from 101 isn't that the protein room I want right in front of house.
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She worked in a senate house which he then later took as the model for the Ministry of Truth IE
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lies. So she knew what could be published and what couldn't be published and she said to him,
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no one is going to publish an essay critical of Stalin right now because he is helping us win the war.
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But I don't know what the next bit of the conversation was but the upshot of that conversation was
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that they turned to writing an animal fable of the kind she had studied under Tolkien,
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the kind that she had wanted to write because she watched very closely the chickens when they were
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just married and they're living in a cottage. They all had personalities and she wanted to write about
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them. So they write this book animal farm. It takes them three months. She goes off to work at a
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different ministry, the Ministry of Food at this time and then she shops for them to find whatever
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she can find for dinner. She comes home and cooks for whoever's been burnt out and then they hop
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into bed together because they can't afford to heat the flat and they work on the book together
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every night. So whatever he's done during the day, they work over and they work out what he's
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going to do the next day. And we know this because every day she went into the ministry and she told
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her friend Letters Cooper about it and Letters Cooper was a novelist who wrote about this and so
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and all her friends at the ministry knew these installments and Eileen was having a ball.
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When it's finally finished all well gives it to Fred Warburg, his publisher,
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he cannot understand how somebody who's written books with a standing grumpy character who
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is himself before has suddenly taken wings and become a poet. He cannot understand it and he
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knows Eileen well and he still can't see it and neither can Richard Reese who says we had no idea
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he was capable of such a thing. The fact was that book which all well considered to be his best book,
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he loved it was the only thing he ever produced that was remotely like that. Everything else is
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completely different and no one has looked. So do we do we think that she actually wrote great
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trunks of it or do we think that she pushed him to write in the style that she was bringing to the
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table? I mean how much do we think this this came from the the mind and heart of Eileen
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Naeo Shawnathy. So when you read Eileen's letters this whimsy the murder or separation letter or the
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letters about other people she's someone who can see other people as characters and always has
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been able to tell stories about them. She's whimsical she's hilarious she's astute about people
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all well as not whimsical he has no idea about other people he has never written another character
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he's certainly never written another female character who's convincing. When you read her letters
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and you read animal farm the voice is the same so I'm sure this could be fed into some computer
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now to work it out. So I don't know how that practically worked I don't know I mean they're sitting
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in bed together they're writing this thing I don't know but it was joyful for both of them.
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And another of your revelations is 1984 that not only was she helping him write this but she'd
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already written a book much earlier in her life or a story called End of the Century 1984.
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I know do you know really I I feel that is a much more mine I think it looks extraordinary she wrote
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a story. It looks extraordinary yes. She wrote a poem called End of the Century 1984 before she
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met Orwell was to commemorate something to do with her high school and it is imagining a dystopian
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future of telepathy and mind control. She dies before animal farm is published very tragically and
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he's writing 1984 he doesn't know what is going to call it till the end he thinks he might call
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it the last man in Europe and so on and he calls it 1984 there is no evidence why he did that or how
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much they had talked about that before she died or whether the poem inspired it or whether 1984 is
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his homage to her I don't see that as anything like the kind of really significant contribution
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such as the co-writing of animal farm. You just sort of mentioned that Eileen died and this might
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be an homage to her memory calling it 1984 but we haven't really said how she died and it's all
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sort of you know what happened was it very sudden was there warning how did he feel about it.
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I'm always a little bit um well I have been in the past the book has been out two years now and I've
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been reluctant to talk about that because for my own very selfish reasons it is the plot shock
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of the book but yes so he was ill with TB she was very unwell they adopted a baby in 1944
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called Richard or well he didn't really want he didn't turn up for the adoption hearing
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as the war was finishing he wanted to go into some reporting from Europe so she has this new
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baby and he goes off to Europe to do some reporting of kind of very minor consequence really for
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the observer and leaves her and she's very ill she has she has uterine cancer at this point
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she'd had a long history of endometriosis she'd had bleeds and feints where she'd fallen unconscious
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and that he knew of she had spent the best part of her life from the age of 30 ministering to his
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health saving his life in everywhere possible making everything possible and when she needed care
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it didn't occur to him it was his responsibility I don't think I think it just didn't and I think
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it and he bugs off and she organizes an operation a hysterectomy he's been very very controlling about
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money even though she's been the one who's been earning it and she writes in these agonizing
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letters organizing his life and hers and writing wills organizing the baby's life
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organizing her medical care to Europe he spent a month in the hotel's crib in Paris
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drinking meeting Hemingway having a very good time he didn't write that to her very in a very timely
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way anyway she she chose in the end to have an operation that was cheaper than one that would have
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been safer and she seems to have done that because she says to him I know you don't want me to have
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this operation at all I know you're very worried about money she defends herself she says I have to
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tell you that when I was organizing all your medical care a lot of that was done by my brother so
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you got that for free and you know this procedure would have cost 40 guineas but we didn't pay for it
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but anyway I'm going to do this cheaply and it was a disaster and she dies alone or is he back when
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when she's alone she's alone she's she's she's um 39 and she dies on the operating table she's a
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very well connected medically her brother had been this Harley Street specialist and one of them said
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you are so she weighed 45 kilos and she's tall woman you are so anemic that you have to have a
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series of blood transfusions and go to hospital and get fatter before we can operate on you and she
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says I'm going to have the cheaper option up here in the north and she does and she dies on the table
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oh gosh allergy to the anesthesia is it what's that um I the nicetis was a woman and um basically the
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coroner wanted it to be no one's fault the surgeon who performed the operation didn't even turn
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up at the coronal inquiry and all well when he got back didn't go and see the surgeon didn't go to
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the coronal inquiry and made no inquiries he was he was distraught but it didn't seem like the sort
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of thing that he felt that he needed just as for uh yeah I mean distraught okay um distraught in
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in a really dysfunctional way not there when she needed him tight with money when she really needed
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that and then I also read that um bit of an essay about women's sexuality and how you know they're
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always pressing men for sex always demanding sex men have to you know run away from it and I said
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at the time he's talking about eyelid I mean what's he talking about eyelid does he look back on
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eyelid's contribution does he what does he leave as her legacy or does he leave nothing at all
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he leaves nothing at all he moved on very very quickly I knew shortly for the time he wanted to keep
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the baby Richard he wanted to keep looking after him so he hired a very nice young woman who
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was divorcing her came bridged on that she was a 27-year-old with a child of her own who was in
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boarding school and she came as a sort of housekeeper to him and so we have her testimony really she's
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spoken on radio and spoke to people about what he was like in those days and he she said I never
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noticed any grief in him but he did seem sad and lonely now he offered her all islands clothes
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he started proposing to other women he bail in you very interesting women all his girlfriends
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have always been pretty much except for the young prostitutes in Burma usually literary women
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interesting women he started proposing to many other interesting women you could read this as
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evidence of his loneliness or you could read this as evidence of his callousness couldn't you
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you could look at it two different ways that's true it is callous certainly to the to the
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women I mean good friends of his said a woman who lived till she was 101 called Brenda
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Southkeldt who was a clergyman's daughter he voted a novel before he met
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island called clergyman's daughter he was in love with her she refused to have anything to do with
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him he said to her if we got married you would have to stop seeing your brother and she said don't
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be ridiculous I'm devoted to my brother so he had this isolationist impulse from the beginning
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we call it coercive control these days you can get done for it in a court of law yes exactly and
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she also said to him Brenda and a couple of girlfriends this is women who saw him up close and
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knew him well and liked him said you really shouldn't write about people you haven't got a clue
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so I just think he was one of those people who didn't didn't really see other people
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I I just don't know how to feel about all of this because I have loved all well I have absolutely
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loved his work I have been profoundly moved by it I've been educated by it it's it's taken me into
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chapters of history that I then became obsessed with and then to hear this you know sort of this
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very deficient stroke possibly downright cruel and sadistic man I don't know how to feel about him
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now I wonder whether you having discovered all of this and put all of this together do you still
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like all well do you know I think it's more shocking when you first encounter it I have a huge
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admiration for what he did he worked so hard and I love his writing and I really can separate it
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from his so-called pouncing and sexual assaults putting a knife through a live edda you know
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there were all kinds of bizarre things that he gauche or called cruel sadistic things that he did
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but we're looking at the man who wrote about room 101 and having rats in a cage on your face
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this is a sadistic grim paranoid preciant important thing to have in literature
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we should not expect a hail fellow well met well adjusted sexually content every man
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decent upright upstanding fellow to produce a work like that it is our readers fantasy that
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is disappointing we need all well to be the man he was to have written the work he did and we need
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her to have been the woman she was to have co-written animal farm and I don't think knowing any of
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that takes anything away I think it's a great addition to our knowledge if you look at the other
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writers of his generation most of them are also pretty hopeless with women and not particularly
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nice to their wives do you think he was any worse than any of the rest of them I mean look at
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if you look at even a war for example kind of monster in many ways at home all looks looks
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benign compared to him but what's so extraordinary at all is that he isn't the man of his generation
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when he's writing about imperialism he isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about
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fascism he is a he ears ahead about the way he writes about totalitarianism and communism is this
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sort of attitude not exactly the sort of patriarchal attitudes we should expect of a writer from
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the 1920s 1930s in a tweed suit so his vision of colonialism for instance and then later as you
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say communism and fascism that vision as I mentioned is very much informed by his mother's
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feminism and socialism we have to bear that in mind as not as if he was some genius that was
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totally self-made he was utterly educated by these left-wing Fabian suffragette women to look at
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things from the point of view of the oppressed but he could not look at things from the point of view
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of women so he could do it with regard to race in Burma and say the empire is a system of
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despotism with theft as its aim way before everybody else of his generation way before everybody else
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but you could also say that patriarchy is a system of wage theft and sexual exploitation as its aim
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but that was something impossible for a man of his generation even with a feminist aunt and mother
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so I think that's where that's where we get in as with all the other writers of his generation
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I haven't done a comparative study but what I am interested in is the fact that they were all
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able to pretend to be and to be seen as decent fellows in public at the same time as doing this
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horrendous stuff in private and women's shame which is a patriarchal concept kept what was being
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done to them private and I think that is a core element of patriarchy and if you look today at
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Trumpism so fascism is a very extreme form of patriarchy comes out of patriarchy and you look at
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what it's doing to women we need to be very aware of how these things work so it's not that he was
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particularly bad or not as bad as the other men it's that they were all entitled to this behavior
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in a system which is like racism only it's patriarchy I've loved this absolutely loved this thank you
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so so much Anna funder as I say her book if you would like to order it we have discount on our club
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then pypoduk.com I really hope you've enjoyed this this mini series next up we're going to be talking
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about another of our imperial writers and Joseph Conrad is his name this may or may not be of any
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interest it might just be a background thing but all we're loved Conrad just admired him and
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absolutely loved his work and when he was in UCL hospital Sonja brought to him a copy of a biography
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that Conrad's wife had written about Conrad and the next time Sonja turned up in the room he threw
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this book across the room and his never do that to me and she took that so seriously I think she
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was as you mentioned before very serious about protecting his legacy from biographers and
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terrible filmmakers and so on and I wonder if that was the start of it it's been so wonderful
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having you on and I can't tell you how much you've given or me personally but I'm sure
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everybody does this to think about and Joseph Conrad is with the wonderful Maya Jassanov another
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extraordinary woman writer woohoo two on the trot why don't you tell us about something else that
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people can enjoy William as a bonus episode if they join the club a wonderful bonus episode
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on John Bucken of the 39 steps another writer who is obsessed with empire and who who's writing
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about it reflects very interestingly on imperialism we've got back our wonderful friend of the show
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Murray Pettick from Scotland to talk about him so that's if you join up to the empire club you can
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get access to that so till and next time we meet it's goodbye from me Anita Arden and goodbye
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from me William Durumpel
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hi there it's David all the sugar from journey through time and here's that extract from our gun
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powder plot series that I mentioned earlier the person who's not rejoicing is Guy Forks in
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the tower King James himself came to the tower to question Forks that's quite an astonishing fact
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that Forks and the King looked into each other's eyes at that moment and of course interrogations
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at this time and when we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned but interrogations are
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brutal violent yeah and it's going to get much much more violent forks stands up to the King
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and aware that actually even impresses the King he's open that they plan to blow up parliament he said
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that the aim had been to blow King James and the other scots back to their Scottish mountains he
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says that to the King it takes guts but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the
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person you've just tried to murder who and your fate is in his hands yeah well I think forks is
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knows what's going to happen I mean the King was impressed by his obstinacy that he would not
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reveal the names of his Kirkonspirators that he was willing to insult the King to his face and
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you have to say about Guy Forks a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years my god he had guts
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and he is a bad man he is a religious fanatic he's not somebody I admire but my god he was brave
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you know you can be brave and wrong yeah you can be brave and involved in things that are evil
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at the same time and he was he was all of those things but this willingness to stand up to the King
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this is before the torture if you want to hear more about Gump powder trees and and plot
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listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts
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hello i'm David Olishogga and i'm Sarah Churchill this week on Journey Through Time we are exploring
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the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605 the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in
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what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history the plan was
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ruthless blow up parliament king james the first and most of his family all in a single blow
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the series will tell the story of treason and traitors of a group of men led by the charismatic
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Robert Catesby who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics
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with the violent destruction of the Stuart state we look at the story of Guy Forks the nation's
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most famous traitor from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being
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tortured and killed finally we find out why this plot is still remembered now 400 years later
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listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts