George Orwell was an Eton-educated colonial policeman who quit the British Empire, deliberately lived among tramps and miners to understand poverty from the inside, fought fascism in Spain where he was shot through the throat, and wrote 1984 — the most influential political novel of the twentieth century — while dying of tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island. Every word he wrote was an act of political engagement, and his final masterpiece was a race against his own death.

This episode traces Orwell from his colonial Burma childhood through the tramping years, the Spanish Civil War, Animal Farm, and the Jura island isolation where he completed 1984 before the tuberculosis that killed him at forty-six.

• The Eton education, the Burma police years, and the imperial guilt that drove him to live among the poor
• Down and Out i ...