When George Orwell sat down in 1947 to prepare a preface to the first Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, he produced a concise masterclass in personal and political biography. He whisks through his upbringing in British India; his education at Eton, “the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schools”; his miserable service in the Burma Police; his living “mostly from hand to mouth” in Paris; and his drift toward socialism.

He then describes his major political awakening during the Spanish Civil War, during which he was wounded by a fascist bullet and then, having joined a Trotskyist militia on the side of the left-wing Republican government, caught up in the infighting as the Soviet communist-aligned forces gained ascendancy. His friends were killed, imprisoned, or “simply disappeared.” He and his wife were “very lucky to get out of Spain alive.”

It was this experience that inspired him to write Animal Farm, with the goal of “exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.” And he did, giving the world the immortal tale that has since sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages. But to understand the story is to understand the contradictions within its author. He came from a........

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