‘D.J. Taylor is the keeper of the Orwell flame’ THE TIMES

Animal Farm, George Orwell’s allegory of the Soviet Revolution, was one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, a devastating satire whose influence is still felt over eighty years after it first appeared. But behind its success lies an extraordinary story of subterfuge, censorship and deceit, involving publishers frightened that it would jeopardise the war effort and Russian spies determined to frustrate its path to the bookshop shelves.

In The Story of Animal Farm, Orwell’s biographer D.J. Taylor offers a fascinating account of the novel’s long gestation, the difficulties Orwell faced in getting it into print, its reception in the war-torn Britain of 1945, and its long and resonant afterlife in which sponsors as varied as the CIA, Eastern European dissidents and African democracy movements rushed to claim it for their own.

The Story of Animal Farm is the fifth title in Old Street’s Great Events series – short, beautiful books on turning points in modern history.