For a bit of context: Herself's (Penguin) copy of Animal Farm has an advert at the end for Homage to Catalonia, about Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War:

.... In feeling --- and almost in the outline of events --- these embittered chapters of autobiography foreshadow Orwell's masterpiece of satire, Animal Farm. [...]

It is with a sense of anger that one reads how an idealistic English volunteer, gravely wonded at the front, is at length forced into hiding and flight as Communists, Anarchists, and near-Trotskyites settle their differences in the streets of Barcelona.