Before he died in 1949, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm – of “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others” fame – was writing the review of his coetaneous Evelyn Waugh’s book Brideshead Revisited.

Would a substitute from Corradino be more acceptable?- Andrè Zammit, Sliema

I was struck by the following lines: “.... the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this day there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacifist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today, it would need no courage at all.”

Now Orwell was no dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

It pains me to read, sometimes good people I know quite well, proclaim how far ahead of the Church they are and how irrelevant God and the Ten Commandments and traditional family and moral values have become in this technologically advanced and illuminated age.

We are even seeing a possible problem for our new European Commissioner-designate, a prime example of a good politician and exemplary family man, because of his possibly not very liberal views on homosexuality, divorce and abortion. Perhaps we should look in the Corradino Corrective Facility for a substitute that would be more ideal for Brussels.