The author of Animal Farm and 1984 was a brilliant, eccentric, complicated man. Born into a comfortable English family and educated at Eton, he was, at various times, a member of the colonial police force in Burma, a tramp, a dishwasher, a critic and journalist, a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a teacher and a shopkeeper.

In the summer of 1983, radio producer Stephen Wadhams spent eight weeks crisscrossing Britain and Spain interviewing more than seventy people who had known Orwell for a five-hour CBC radio documentary broadcast on the first day of 1984. The result was a unique...