The Orwellians

Keir Giles is an associate fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He has also worked with the BBC Monitoring Service and as a consultant on Russian military and security matters for the UK Defence Academy. He is the author of American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in its Long War with Washington.

Lana Estemirova grew up in Chechnya, where she experienced two wars with Russia.She has worked as a freelance journalist for The Guardian and The Moscow Times, and presented the podcast The Trouble with the Truth in partnership with the London-based charity, Justice for Journalists.Lana’s mother, Natalia Estemirova, was a prominent journalist and human rights activist in Chechnya. Natalia wrote for Novaya Gazeta and documented torture, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings in the North Caucasus for the human rights group Memorial. She was abducted and murdered in 2009, and no one has ever been prosecuted for the crime.Lana's book is Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother, and Me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.