Orwell's Last Stand: A Cold War Documentary

Tech, Power & Media

By 1949, George Orwell was dying. He didn’t know it, but the next 12 months would be his final stand against totalitarianism. Stuck in the Cranham Sanatorium in the Cotswolds, Orwell, real name Eric Blair, was attempting to get over the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis, publish 1984, which he had completed by December 1948, and spread the readership of Animal Farm. He would also cooperate with a new secretive organisation, The Information Research Department, and correspond with an agent operating for another unit from the secret world, The Pond.

With thanks to The Imperial War Museum, Paul Lashmar, Dorian Lynskey and Mark Stout.

Lashmar’s Spin, Spies and the Fourth Estate can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spin-Spies-Fourth-Estate-Lashmar/dp/1474443087/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1614502073&refinements=p_27%3APaul+Lashmar&s=books&sr=1-1

Lynskey’s Ministry of Truth can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ministry-Truth-Biography-George-Orwells/dp/1509890734/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RBKVCZKRPG2K&dchild=1&keywords=dorian+lynskey&qid=1614502154&s=books&sprefix=Dorian+Lynskey%2Cstripbooks%2C185&sr=1-1

Music credit:

Scott Buckley’s Machina, Beautiful Oblivion and Ascension licenced under CC-BY 4.0

https://www.scottbuckley.com.au/

Audio credits:

Emma Topping, Ash Steel, Norman Reddaway (interviewed by ©The Imperial War Museum) and Christopher Hitchens reading Robert Conquest’s George Orwell (1969) poem

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The Tech, Power and Media podcast looks at the intersection and relationships between technology, media and the power it creates, limits and changes. Hosted by Ian Silvera, editor of Future News https://www.news-future.com​​​

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Research Resources

• The National Archives’ FO 1110 series
• History Notes from The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
• Report of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry
• Britain's Secret Propaganda War by Paul Lashmar and James Oliver
• In Celia’s Office by Robert Conquest for The Hoover Institute
• Our Job Is To Make Life Worth Living (Complete Works S.) edited by Peter Davison
• The Orwell Archive at University College London
• The Centre for Conflict, Security and Terrorism at The University of Nottingham
• Time To Explain by Christopher Mayhew
• Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941–1991 by Brian Crozier
• A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre
• The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme at Churchill College, Cambridge University
• The Oral History Programme at the Imperial War Museum, London
• The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training at the Library of Congress
• The CIA Reading Room
• The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA by Mark Stout
• The House of Commons’ Hansard Service for 13 January 1981
• The Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive