* The best encapsulation of the disordered, sado-masochistic relationship between rulers and ruled in a closed society with a One Man regime is provided, as so often, by George Orwell, who in Coming Up for Air wrote of “the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader until they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.”

* Orwell once wrote that all his happiest memories of boyhood were somehow connected to animals, yet his favorite word of disapproval for human behavior was “beastly.” He made his name with an almost self-hating essay about shooting an elephant. As an amateur farmer he came to detest pigs. In Nineteen Eighty-four the most horrifying moment involves the use of rats as instruments of torture. Yet he also loved the Thames Valley and was plainly influenced by The Wind in the Willows. One wants to read, or perhaps write, an essay on this subtext and its implications.

* In “The Freedom of the Press” he does make an approving reference to Rosa Luxemburg, the martyred Jewish German-Polish revolutionary, murdered in 1919 by the German right-wing, who was on the extreme Left but who had prophetically warned Lenin of the danger of making a habit of “emergency measures.”

* In an especially acute feuilleton entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb” in Tribune in October 1945.

* This is from his Sonnet XII, in which he defends himself from various traducers. It attacks them as “owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs.” One wonders if Orwell was fully aware of the animal element here.

* I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Castro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raúl, in August 2006.