Animal Farm – Interesting Literature

Boxer in Animal Farm: Character Profile

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Boxer is an enormous cart-horse who possesses the strength of two average horses. The character is one of the most important in George Orwell’s 1945 allegory for Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. Indeed, after the two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, Boxer is arguably the most significant character in Orwell’s fable about Stalinist Russia in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

The Origin and Meaning of ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Orwell’s famous six-word slogan, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’

The six-word sentence ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ is one of the two widely known lines from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm – the other being ‘all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’.