[W]hen George Orwell sent Animal Farm to TS Eliot for consideration, the poet - then a director of Faber and Faber - rejected it as 'unconvincing'. In a letter from 1944 explaining why he would not be publishing the work, Eliot told Orwell that he was not persuaded by the 'Trotskyite' politics which underpin the narrative. To publish such an anti-Russian novel would jar in the contemporary political climate, explained the poet.