The animals behind Animal Farm

I SAW a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them.’

When George Orwell wrote this passage in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm in 1947, explaining the genesis of his allegorical novella, the book had already been read in Britain and beyond for almost two years, which makes 2020 the 75th anniversary of its launch.

Animal Farm would become Orwell’s first commercial success and the one that would begin to cement his reputation as a literary giant. He would follow it with his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel he wrote when isolated from the rest of the world on the Hebridean island of Jura, dying of tuberculosis.

path to the bookshops was strewn