In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books I discovered the following. George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald exchanged letters in December 1946 about the meaning of Orwell's fable, Animal Farm. Macdonald wrote that some people have been citing the book as an argument that revolutions always end badly, "hence to hell with it and hail the status quo." Macdonald himself didn't take the book as having any such broad a meaning, he took it as specifically applying to the history of Russia and the failure of its revolution. But he had been surprised by the prevalence of the other view and was asking Orwell for guidance. Orwell replied: "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant...