Dominic Sandbrook

Thank you, Alastair.

It's nice to be on a proper professional podcast for once.

So it's a show that I do with my producer on The Rest Is History, who's called Tabitha Syrett.

And we always chat about books and what we're reading, our favourite novels.

And we did a mini-series together on The Rest Is History for Rest Is History Club members.

And we did a mini-series together on The Rest Is History for Rest Is History Club members.

where we talked about some of our favourite books.

The listeners liked it amazingly, so we decided to launch it as a standalone show.

We've done four or five episodes, and we recently did an episode that might appeal to you, Alistair, because it's on a very political book.

It's actually last week's episode, and it was George Orwell's 1984, which I think you read when you were at school.

Is that right?

Yeah, we were talking about this on the show actually.

It's such an interesting thing because there aren't many books that embed themselves in the imagination so successfully.

And a lot of the concepts that Orwell comes up with, so the idea of Britain as airstrip one, the idea of double think.

So in other words, having two ideas in your head at once and one of them you know is a lie, but you force yourself to believe it anyway.

The thing about Big Brother, the thing about Room 101.

I think what's so interesting to me is that, I don't know whether you would agree with this, is that it's obviously, you read it, it's massively a book of its time.

So shaped in the Second World War and the Cold War.

And what Orwell's writing about is the totalitarianism of Stalin in particular.

But as you say, you look at the world now.