Joey himself is the only consistent presence Albert is the only one of his human handlers with whom we spend any significant length of time. Like its previous incarnations, the War Horse film faces the hurdle of the story's episodic nature. Surrounded by chaos and death, it seems unlikely that he will survive – but somewhere in the trenches is his beloved Albert, who has come looking for him. Their ride into battle is only the beginning of Joey's journey, and as the war rages on, he passes through many different hands on all sides of the conflict. The First World War breaks out, and Joey is sold to Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), a cavalry officer.

However, bigger forces are about to tear boy and horse apart. The spirited animal is completely unsuitable for farm work, but this doesn't stop Albert from bonding with him, even training him to plough in an act of defiance against the family's grabbing landlord (David Thewlis). When his drunken father (Peter Mullan) brings home a thoroughbred horse, Devonshire farm boy Albert (Jeremy Irvine) falls in love at first sight.

Now Steven Spielberg has brought Joey to the screen. The stage adaptation, featuring life-sized bamboo puppet horses, has captivated audiences since its debut at the Royal National-Olivier Theatre, London, in 2007. His 1982 novel War Horse imagines the conflict through the eyes of a single innocent, unwilling participant – a horse named Joey. Speaking on Times Radio, the former children's laureate said: “What you have to do is tell the same story, but tell it in a way that the children in the 21st century can read.How do you begin to tell stories about a war which claimed more than fifteen million lives? For children's author Michael Morpurgo, the answer was to start as small as possible. The writer has suggested that instead of wholesale rewrites or the purging of language from classic books, modern authors could reimagine the stories of the past in a way that would take account of contemporary sensitivities. You just cannot go on rewriting Dickens and rewriting Shakespeare to suit people.” “I think that it's really important for children to read books and have some sense of when the books were written. If you start the nitpicking, you never stop. The author of War Horse said: “We've learnt a lot that's been very good, we've learnt a lot that's rubbish.

Morpurgo’s comments were made after The Telegraph revealed that the works of Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and PG Wodehouse have been edited to avoid causing offence.

The author said that you “cannot go on rewriting to suit people” when it comes to potentially dated language in classic texts. Sir Michael Morpurgo has warned publishers against rewriting classic books for modern sensitivities and to stop “nitpicking” over language.

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo