A telling satire on fashionable thinking among the elite.
Why do fashionable ideas continue to circulate among the elite, long after ordinary people have realised that they are nonsense? Andersen’s folk-tale explains it brilliantly.
It’s easier to change how you look than to hide who you are.
Originally, this story was about a weasel, an animal which the ancient Greeks kept for pest control in the way we keep cats. Modern Greek versions of this story make it a story about a cat, as did Victorian storyteller Joseph Jacobs.