When I described The Wind in the Willows as about the only book that adults as well as children can read with equal satisfaction, in which the protagonists are animals, I was drawing a contrast mainly with fables. I was implying, perhaps not entirely correctly, that adults would not derive as much satisfaction from fables as children. Conversely, the writer who perhaps made the most effective transition to the world after the Second World War wrote a book involving animals which was emphatically intended for adults. Children reading it, often as a prescribed text, are in effect apprentices in political and social criticism.

I refer to Animal Farm, the allegory about Soviet Communism which George Orwell wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. He was a strange man, and a strange writer, an Etonian with deep resentment of the British ruling class, a socialist accused of claiming that ‘the working classes smell’.

The accusation was by the Daily Worker, the communist party newspaper, and arose from the infighting within the left, following the split between Stalin and Trotsky in the Soviet Union. Orwell experienced this during the Spanish Civil War, when he went out to support the Republican forces, and found their internal rivalries allowed the Fascist forces easy triumphs. He wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia, which was not a success, perhaps because in 1938, the dangers of fascism loomed large, and the problems in Spain were of less importance.