Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) authored one of the 20th century's great political novels, Darkness at Noon, as well as a number of other fictional works and essay collections which explained the ethos of Communism to the West. The son of a successful...

Whoever would undertake the formidable task of writing the intellectual history of the twentieth century would be well advised to include in it the works of Arthur Koestler and the controversies they helped to spawn. These controversies were both...

Theatrical and literary agents are taking leading roles in a corporate drama in London, resigning one after another from a major agency and threatening to take their clients with them.The exodus from PFD Group Ltd., a leading international literary and talent agency, could be a...

Koestler's gift is bold and fresh, but it is theatrical. He is the declaiming and compelling actor. No one has known better than he when to drop what he is doing and rush to document the latest convulsion. In this fashion, he has run through the political infections of our generation…. How much in his writing is personal experience and how much is an intense imaginative identification with the people he describes is not important; or rather, only the identification is important. It is passiona...

Ever since his birth [Arthur Koestler] has lived as it were in the maelstrom of contemporary history, turning in a continual vortex even as he wrote, and with an unerring instinct homing toward the place of trouble which will affect us all very soon. His environment is the whirlpool, and his creativity explodes out of violence. His virtue, however, is not just restlessness and love of the vortex of contemporary history. It lies in his capacity for entering into what I can only call the conscience of contemp...