“It’s ironic, then, that we have no record of George Orwell’s own voice. Orwell delivered hundreds of BBC radio broadcasts during World War II, but not a whisper remains. There isn’t any film footage of him, either. We have plenty of written records of him, naturally. In fact, for last year’s centennial of Orwell’s birth, two new biographies were released – Gordon Bowker’s Inside George Orwell and D.J. Taylor’s Whitbread Prize-winning Orwell: The Life – as well as a sizable new collection of his essays.”