Couldn’t make it to the Origin Story live show in London on Monday 15 July? Don’t worry, we’ve got audio for you. Listen up as Dorian and Ian take one last wallow in the glory of Election Night ’24… think about what might be in store for some of our favourite bad losers… see how the events of the campaign relate to the subjects of our past series… and of course answer your questions.

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio and video by Simon Williams, Chris Jones and Kieron Leslie. Live events co-ordinator Jill Pearson. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The final episode of season five covers the Rushdie Affair. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie made The Satanic Verses the most famous novel in the world — for all the wrong reasons. The controversy had far-reaching implications for free speech, international relations and the political identity of British Muslims. Although the issue seemed to have been resolved in 1998, the attempted murder of Rushdie in 2022 showed that it was far from over.

Dorian and Ian tell the whole story from all angles: Rushdie’s decade in hiding, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia, community relations in Britain, divisions in the literary scene, and the conflicted responses of politicians around the world.

What exactly did The Satanic Verses say that made people so angry? Which public figures were on Rushdie’s side and which ones thought he had it coming? How did Rushdie get his life back, only to almost lose it decades later? And what is the cultural and political legacy of the affair today? It is a tale of artistic freedom colliding with religious dogma and political calculations to turn a work of fiction into an international incident for the first time.

Reading list

Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007)

Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)

Daniel Pipes – The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990)

Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses (1988)

Salman Rushdie – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991)

Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton (2012)

 Salman Rushdie – Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

Articles

John Cunningham – ‘Sentenced to the prison of the word’, The Guardian (1990)

Will Lloyd – How We Gave Up on Salman Rushdie, UnHerd (2022)

Dorian Lynskey – Salman Rushdie on Quichotte: “The world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end” the i (2019)

Sean O’Grady – The Satanic Verses 30 Years On review, The Independent (2019)

David Remnick – The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, New Yorker (2023)

Salman Rushdie – The Disappeared, New Yorker (2012)

Words for Salman Rushdie – New York Times (1989)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The season five finale coincides with the general election, so we’ve decided to get very topical indeed with the story of Labour leader and likely prime minister Keir Starmer. To his admirers, he’s the master strategist who took Labour from doom to Downing Street in a single term. To his foes, he’s a ruthless liar who will stop at nothing to crush the left. To the average voter, he remains a bit of a blank slate. What kind of prime minister will he be?

Ian and Dorian trace Starmer’s youthful journey from working-class Surrey socialist to indie-loving, centrist-bashing law student, explaining the legacy of a difficult childhood. He was the star human rights lawyer, at the heart of 1990s controversies from the McLibel case to policing in Northern Ireland, who became the country’s top prosecutor and then a knight of the realm. At the age of 52, he entered politics and soon found himself on the frontline of the Brexit wars, butting heads with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. We end with his leadership of the party and the price of victory.

Why is Starmer such a closed book in public? How did he go from radical socialist to centrist dad? What went down between him and Corbyn? Was he really an arch-remainer? When did he almost throw in the towel? And what are the core values that might define his premiership? Discover all this and more in the story of our next prime minister.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Tom Baldwin - Keir Starmer: The Biography (2024)

Oliver Eagleton – The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (2022)

Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)

Tim Shipman – Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (2017)

Articles and podcasts

Emily Ashton, ‘Keir Starmer Is Not Who You Think He Is’, Buzzfeed (2020)

Elliott Chappell, ‘Interview with Keir Starmer’, Labour List (2020)

Desert Island Discs: Sir Keir Starmer (2020)

George Eaton, ‘What Is Starmerism?’, The New Statesman (2024)

Charlotte Edwardes, ‘“You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself”: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet’

The Guardian, ‘In Praise of… Keir Starmer’, The Guardian (2009)

Billy Kenber, ‘Keir Starmer: Radical who attacked Kinnock in Marxist journal’, The Times (2020)

Keir Starmer, ‘Sorry, Mr Blair, but 1441 does not authorise force’, The Guardian (2003)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode tells the tale of the anti-vaxxers. The word has only been around since 2001 but inoculation has inspired opposition for as long as it has existed in the West. Dorian and Ian chart the life of vaccines and their opponents from the fight against smallpox in the eighteenth century to the vaccine scandals of the post-war decades. Find out why someone threw a bomb through Cotton Mather’s window, why Gandhi changed his mind, and why Leicester became the anti-vaccine capital of the world.

The drama accelerates with Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR panic of the 2000s, which swept up everyone for Oprah Winfrey to Private Eye, caused a public health disaster and set the stage for the full-blown mania of the backlash against Covid-19 vaccines. How did a rogue British gastroenterologist launch a global movement? How did vaccine scepticism mutate into a giant conspiracy theory? Is Bill Gates really implanting 5G trackers in our blood? (No.) And what’s the best way to get an anti-vaxxer to think again?

It’s a gripping story of science, journalism, paranoia, superstition and people who should know better.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• David Aaronovitch – Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2010)

• Jonathan M. Berman – Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (2020)

• Steve Brotherton – Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2016)

• Brian Deer – The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (2020)

• Peter Furtado - Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History (2021)

• Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (2023)

• Anna Merlan – Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2020)

• Seth Mnookin – The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (2011)

• Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge - Conspiracy: A History of Bxllocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them (2022)

• Frank M. Snowden - Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019)

Podcasts and articles

• You’re Wrong About: The Anti-Vaccine Movement (2021)

• Maintenance Phase: RFK Jr. and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement (2023)

• Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’, The New Yorker (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime?

In part two, Ian and Dorian tell the story of Lemkin’s invention of genocide and his efforts to make it an international crime. They explain how legal wrangling during the Nuremberg trials led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and why it took so long for anybody to be charged with the crime, let alone brought to justice. Why do so many of the twentieth century’s most horrendous offences not qualify as genocide? Why did international condemnation fail to prevent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia? And why is the case against Israel so contentious?

It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the limits of international law, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013

• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998

• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007

• Norman N. Naimark – Genocide: A World History, 2016

• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002

• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust.

In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime?

In part one, Ian and Dorian chart the prehistory of genocide — the ancient desire of groups to utterly eradicate their enemies. They go from the vengeful massacres of the Old Testament and Greek myth to the destruction of Carthage and the Holy War of the Crusades. Then they enter the age of empire, from the crimes of the Conquistadors to the elimination of the Tasmanians. Modern genocide began with the slaughter of the Herero in East Africa and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for the Nazis.

It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the difference between reckless violence and targeted destruction, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies,

2013

• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our

Families, 1998

• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta

to Darfur, 2007

• Norman N. Naimark - Genocide: A World History, 2016

• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002

• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part two, Ian and Dorian talk about the single most important liberal book ever written, track the ups and downs of the couple's tumultuous affair, and show how Mill became a woke warrior in his old age, fighting against racism and sexism and destroying his carefully-built Victorian reputation in the process.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Ian Dunt – How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)
• Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) – The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)
• John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – On Liberty (1859)
• John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – The Subjection of Women (1869)
• John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham – Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)
• Richard Reeves – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)

Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869)

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)

Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell is writing his finest essays but his life is mayhem so he escapes to the Scottish island of Jura with his baby son to write the novel that, little does he know, will make him a legend.

It's the story of a writer reaching the height of his powers while everything around him seems to be falling to bits. How did a sick man on a lonely island write perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century? Why is his strange masterpiece so widely misunderstood? What were Orwell’s blindspots? Would he have been a good hang? And are taking the right lessons from his life and work? All this, plus Nye Bevan, HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and the atomic bomb.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Image: Peter Cushing (Winston Smith) with Yvonne Mitchell (Julia) and André Morrell (O’Brien) in the 1954 BBC production of George Orwell’s 1984. (Getty)

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it international news. The obituaries hailed him as a beacon of decency, sanity and wisdom during the darkest years of the twentieth century — “the wintry conscience of a generation” in VS Pritchett’s ringing phrase. To this day, his moral authority is claimed by people across the political spectrum. Behind the myth, Orwell was a complicated man, full of flaws and contradictions. His road to success was long, painful and ridiculously eventful.

In part one, Dorian explains how Eric Blair became George Orwell, from Eton to Burma to Paris to Wigan. We then follow Orwell to the Spanish Civil War, where he is shot by fascists and hounded by Stalinists, and finally to Blitz-torn London. It’s the story of a man working out who he is, as a writer and a moral agent, in a world tumbling towards catastrophe. How did Orwell become a socialist? Why did he wind up the other socialists? Why was Spain the great turning point in his life? Are his early novels any good? And was his wife Eileen the queen of deadpan one-liners? All this and more in the return of Origin Story.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street. 

Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaotic floorplan still influences how vital decisions are made. Why does tradition trump efficient governance? How do wily advisers exploit the layout to increase their influence over the PM? Is the door more important than the rest of the house put together? And is it finally time to say goodbye to Number 10?

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices