Animal Farm

The most perfectly crafted political satire ever written. Orwell needs only a few pages to tell his parable about how a revolution corrupts itself, and every line is calculated so the reader understands without being told. The phrase "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" needs no context. It works equally well to describe Stalinism or any other form of authoritarianism with an egalitarian veneer. Brief and lethal.