The Orwellians

DJ Taylor - Tolkien and Orwell, Two Visions of Tyranny

D.J. Taylor is a prolific author of fiction and writing on literature, including four books on George Orwell, among them Orwell: The New Life and, most recently Who Is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell. His most recent book is The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien.

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Joby Warrick - The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist

Joby Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, and was the national security correspondent for The Washington Post from 1996 to 2025. He is the author of The Black Flags (about the rise of ISIS), Triple Agent (about an Al Qaeda mole in the CIA), and Red Line (about Syria’s chemical weapons). His most recent book is The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist.

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Victor Sebestyen - Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy

Journalist and historian Victor Sebestyen discusses his new book, Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy

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Daniela Richterova - Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists

Following the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel defeated its Arab neighbours, the Soviet Bloc, already strongly aligned with the Arab governments, tilted more sharply in favour of Palestinian organisations, particularly the PLO. Many of the Palestinian factions sought arms, training, and refuge in communist Czechoslovakia. Daniela Richterova is a senior lecturer in intelligence studies at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is author of Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries.

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Petr Petrenko - Letters to Political Prisoners in Russia

Petr Petrenko is a lawyer from St. Petersburg and an anti-war campaigner who organises public events in London in support of political prisoners in Russia. He holds an LLM in Human Rights Law from Queen Mary University of London and has ten years’ experience practicing and teaching law in Russia. Petr has organised a letter-writing project that helps people to communicate with and support Russians imprisoned for criticising the war in Ukraine. He also holds daily anti-war vigils outside Russian embassies.

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Howard Amos - Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire

Howard Amos discusses his book "Russia Starts Here," a travelogue that illuminates Russia's Pskov region from its mediaeval history to the war in Ukraine. He talks about returning to Russia to complete his book in 2023, after most western journalists had left, and about how war, censorship, and overwhelming propaganda have changed the region and the country.

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Sean Wiswesser - Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War

Sean Wiswesser, a retired CIA senior operations officer, discusses his book on Russian intelligence tactics from the Cold War to the 21st century.

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Lucy Ash - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church From Pagans to Putin

Award-winning journalist and broadcaster Lucy Ash discusses her book The Baton and The Cross, which combines history and reportage to tell the story of church-state relations in Russia from ancient times to the war in Ukraine.

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Marc Bennetts - The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral Into Madness Under Putin

Marc Bennetts, a correspondent for the Times and Sunday Times, was forced to leave Russia in 2022, after living in the country for 25 years. His new book The Descent is a visceral memoir of his journalistic experiences and the cruel consequences of Kremlin propaganda

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Pavel Otdelnov - Estates: Fragile Utopia

Pavel Otdelnov is a Russian artist who moved to London from Moscow in 2022. He works in various media and is best known for his projects about his hometown--the industrial city of Dzerzhinsk--and for his powerful visual metaphors for Soviet history and life in contemporary Russia. His latest exhibition, Estates: Fragile Utopia, is about postwar social housing projects in Britain, and their resonances with Soviet urban landscapes. It is on display at Lewisham Art House until April 20th, 2026

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Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan - Our Dear Friends in Moscow

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are investigative journalists who focus on on the Russian intelligence agencies. They are the co-founders of agentura.ru and are now senior fellows at the Centre for European Policy Analysis and visiting staff at the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence. They moved to London in 2020 following an apparent threat to Andrei’s life. In this interview, they discuss their book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, which is about how a group of their journalistic colleagues became pro-Kremlin propagandists.

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Kaveh Shahrooz - Massacres and War in Iran

Lawyer and human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz discusses the massacres by Iranian security forces that killed thousands--maybe tens of thousands--of Iranian protesters this January, as well as the US and Israeli military action against Iran that began at the end of February. Kaveh is a senior fellow at the MacDonald Laurier Institute, and a former adviser on human rights to Global Affairs Canada. He also led an effort to get the Canadian parliament to recognise the mass killing of political prisoners in Iran in 1988 as a crime against humanity.

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Andrei Kolesnikov - The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin's Ideology Took the Nation Hostage

Andrei Kolesnikov discusses his book, The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin's Ideology Took the Nation Hostage. Andrei is a contributor to Foreign Affairs, Novaya Gazeta, and New Times. Previously, Andrei was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think tank connected with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, until the Russian government forced it to close in 2022. The Russian government labelled him a "foreign agent" the same year.

Filip Kovacevic - KGB Literati

Filip Kovacevic is an intelligence historian, an adjunct professor in the Departments of Politics and Global Studies at the University of San Francisco, and the author of KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union. In this interview, Kovacevic discusses the emergence in the USSR of heroic espionage stories written by people with backgrounds in Soviet intelligence. Their aims included promoting Soviet views of international relations, encouraging public vigilance against foreign spies, and establishing a heroic myth that would help recruit future generations of intelligence agents.

James Rodgers - The Return of Russia

Journalist James Rodgers discusses his new book, "The Return of Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin", which is about Russia's re-emergence as a military power in the decades since the end of the Cold War. James has reported from Russia for the BBC and Reuters. He has covered the collapse of the USSR, the two wars in Chechnya, the beginning of Putin's presidency, and Russia's 2008 war with Georgia. He now teaches journalism at City St. George's, University of London

Masha Karp - George Orwell and Russia

Author Masha Karp discusses her book, "George Orwell and Russia." Masha is the editor of the Orwell Society Journal and a board member of the Orwell Society. In addition to writing "George Orwell and Russia" in English, she has written the first biography of George Orwell to appear in Russian, and has translated Animal Farm into Russian. From 1991 to 2009, she worked for the BBC Russian Service, first as a producer and later as features editor.

Peter Sturm - Staging Dostoevsky in London

Playwright and director Peter Sturm discusses his London-based production of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man," which is performed by actor Tom Larkin. The genre-bending story, which has aspects of gothic horror, science fiction, and religious parable, first appeared in Dostoevsky's "A Writer's Diary" in 1877, alongside some of the writer's most nationalistic essays. But can Dostoevsky's unreliable narrator's message of universal love be interpreted as "an antidote to war"? More info about the production: splitmoontheatre.org tomlarkinproductions.co.uk Roland Elliott Brown is the author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda with FUEL Publishing. He has written for New Lines, The Critic, The Spectator, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy, among other publications.