Orwell’s Ghosts

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography | Goldsmith Book Prize 2025 Winner (Trade) | A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 | A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year

With Orwell claimed by all sides of the culture wars, returning to his own world and words offers sharp and surprising lessons for today’s crises.

Seventy-five years after 1984 first published, George Orwell is back. Progressives denounce ‘Orwellian’ untruths by Trump, Johnson, Putin et al, while conservatives accuse governments and mainstream media of ‘Orwellian’ censorship. But what does ‘Orwellian’ really mean? What would the man himself say about these crises, and what can we learn from his ideas?

Orwell’s Ghosts reveals Orwell in all his complexity, exploring his commitment to political liberty and economic justice alongside his undeniable chauvinism. This sharp free thinker’s commentaries remain invaluable, whether on political truth, disinformation, class, race and empire, or highlighting the promise of socialism and the dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. Even Orwell’s misogyny offers troubling lessons about gender politics on the left. All of his books show remarkable resonance between the first half of the twentieth century and today’s world.

Revisiting Orwell’s own age of rapid change and urgent crossroads, this book sheds unique light on both our recent past and our current upheavals.