Animal Farm

How revolutions are betrayed, told as a fable simple enough for a child and sharp enough to be banned by the powerful. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others: the line catches the whole mechanism by which a movement for freedom becomes a new tyranny in the name of the old cause. Orwell wrote it about a specific betrayal and it has fit every betrayal since. The shortest serious book on this shelf, and one of the most exact.

The English writer who made clear prose a political weapon and political clarity a moral demand. Politics and the English Language argues that vague, ugly writing serves power by hiding what it does. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm turned that conviction into fiction that gave the century its vocabulary for tyranny: doublethink, the memory hole, all animals equal but some more equal than others. He wrote against the lie in every form he found it.