17 OCTOBER 1981, Page 19

The seeds of truth

Sir: John Stewart Collis in his excellent homage to George Orwell, 'Genius for description' (10 October), is quite right to point to Orwell's dibble trouble with Stalinism in Barcelona when he writes, 'This experience planted the seed of Animal Farm.'

Its truth was honoured by the first-ever Catalan rock-opera after the lifting of linguistic restrictions in 1976, and Granja Animal was performed by a fringe theatre group in Catalonia's capital not 300 yards from the Ramblas hotel where Orwell witnessed the swinish betrayal of his Anarchist ex-comrades in 1937.

Nicholas Rankin Pakenham, Suffolk