Animal Farm: Sixty Years On

Robert Pearce gives a historian’s-eye view of George Orwell’s classic novel.

‘A little squib which might amuse you’: so George Orwell dismissed the book he was completing in February 1944. ‘There’s a farm, and the animals get fed up with the way the farmer runs it,’ he wrote, summarizing the plot, ‘so they chuck him out and try to run it for themselves. But they run it just as badly as the farmer and become tyrants like him.’ Seldom can an author have so misrepresented the passionate intensity invested in his work, or have made a novel seem such a poor publishing proposition.

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