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 contemporary events. That this is a shifting conscience, which tells him at one time to be on one side or at one place and another at a quite different one, is disconcerting and bitter to his political allies, but it is what really makes for his significance as a man and a writer. Mr. Koestler is a restless instrument who attaches himself to a conflict and gives us a kind of reading of the moral issues involved. He reminds us that the reading may be different at different times. Communism was a better cause in 1933 than it is in 1952.
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