George Orwell

Political commentator and President of YouGov.com chooses older books from both sides of the Atlantic to show what really matters in politics.

The author and journalist talks about a Burma where women wear fresh flowers in their hair, where houses are populated by spirits, butterflies are as big as brooches and the regime throws political prisoners into camps

Seventy years on from its initial publication, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is just as resonant in today’s era of misinformation and fake news as it was in the incipient Cold War era. D J Taylor, author of a lauded biography of Orwell and a forthcoming biography of Nineteen Eighty-Four, takes us through the extraordinary impact of the author’s fiction and reportage.

Warnings about the future of society contained in novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four may seem less important since the fall of the Soviet Union, but they are all too relevant to China today, argues the Chinese writer

Satire is humour used for a moral purpose, explains American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke—though it doesn’t have to be particularly funny and can be quite dark. Here, he chooses five classic works of political satire, books that lay bare the shortcomings of not only communism and fascism but also the two-party system and the quest for a perfect society where everyone is happy.

The job of the intelligence services is to understand others and help leaders act more wisely, says the author of a new history of the FBI. There’s a balance to be struck between liberty and security but when the CIA and FBI do not harmonise their intelligence missions, people die.

Can torture ever be justified? No, says the UN special rapporteur, who tells us how torturers try to excuse themselves and what remedies should be available to surviving victims

Global security consultant says sending armed forces into another country based on purely moral, gut feelings of good and evil is a dangerous policy-making premise. He chooses books on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Al Qaeda

Poet, writer and Bafta winning TV and film producer, Henry Normal, talks about his experiences bringing up his autistic son, the need for acceptance and why we should all embrace our human imperfections. Along the way he recommends five books that inspired him as a young man and continue to inspire him today.

Jane Eyre, 1984 and Anne Frank’s diary all make it onto novelist Amanda Craig’s list. On Black Beauty‘s underrated importance: ‘People forget that William Wilberforce, who abolished the slave trade, also founded the RSPCA.’

Robert Service, Professor of Russian Studies at Oxford, when forced to choose between Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, says Stalin was definitely the worst of the lot. He takes a look at the dynamics of totalitarian Russia, gleaning insights from Thucydides to Orwell.

Heather Brooke’s investigative journalism was the catalyst for the MPs expenses scandal of 2009. With an eye to how power corrupts, from Orwell’s Animal Farm to an apartheid memoir, she looks at importance of sticking to one’s principles and the dangers that arise when we don’t

The city of romance and art is also, like most big cities, a place of grit and grime. The American writer and long-time Paris resident David Downie tells us where to look if we’re to understand the people and past of this most alluring city.

To learn how to live well we must look to the past, says social philosopher Roman Krznaric. He recommends five books, from Thoreau to Orwell, that inspire us to live more adventurously.

The co-founder of the Leon chain of healthy fast food restaurants describes his growth as a chef through books, from Orwell to Jacques Pépin

The history professor tells us what today’s dissidents can learn from the experience of Eastern Europe and explains how Václav Havel leaves a lasting legacy of how to challenge the over-mighty

Our political and economic systems are inadequate and failing. But what can we do? The author of a new book on the subject tells us what inspired his involvement in the Occupy movement and how a leaderless revolution could work

Historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash describes the “mongrel genre” between reportage and scholarship and says using the historian’s tools to analyse the present is a vital undertaking

NPR host and former foreign correspondent offers practical and anecdotal guidance on reporting the news. Says, “I don’t buy this idea that there was a golden age in journalism”

Photographers Beth and Thom Atkinson, authors of the acclaimed photobook Missing Buildings, discuss five books that explore the mythology of war.