Robert Colls – The Collier’s Rant

Colls's first book The Collier’s Rant (1977) explored popular song and image as expressed in 19th-century broadsheets and music hall. 

The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield 1790-1850 (1987) tried to bring the miners into the orbit of 
E P Thompson’s path-breaking The Making of the English Working Class. 

Geordies (1992) is a collection of regionalist essays edited with Bill Lancaster to which Colls contributed a hefty piece. 

Newcastle upon Tyne: A Modern History (2001), and Northumbria. History and Identity (2007) completed his northern trilogy. Englishness: 

Politics and Letters 1880-1920 (1986), co-edited with Philip Dodd, was first of a new wave of studies on English national identity and was published in a second edition by Bloomsbury in 2014 with a new 

Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by Will Self. His book Identity of England (2002) received significant critical acclaim. His most recent book, 

George Orwell: English Rebel, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. D J Taylor in The Guardian thought it was a "prime ornament of Orwell Studies". 

A N Wilson in The Spectator said he thought it was "the most sensible and systematic interpretation of Orwell I have ever read". 

Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph said that "If there is a better book on George Orwell I have yet to discover it". 

David Aaronovitch in the New Statesman called Colls "a lovely writer, fearless in a way that academics too often are not". David Evans in The Independent remarked that "Colls writes like an offbeat mixture of Isaiah Berlin and Clive James" which Colls was happy to take as a compliment.