ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Animal Farm tells the story of a rebellion and how it goes wrong. The animals’ lives on the farm are terrible – there is not enough food, the work is hard, and animals are dying. One day, the animals kick out the farmer and start to run the farm. Soon, a group of animals – the pigs – becomes more and more important, but things are not better for most of the animals. Life for them is the same as before.

Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging ‘cold war’ (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning.