Arthur Koestler

This was the third novel of Arthur Koestler's trilogy on ends and means - the other two are THE GLADIATORS and DARKNESS AT NOON - and the first he wrote in English. The central theme is the conflict between morality and expediency, and in this novel Koestler worked it out in terms of individual psychology. Peter Slavek starts out as a brave young revolutionary, but suffers a breakdown. On the analyst's couch he is made to discover, in Koestler's own words, 'that his crusading zeal was derived from unconscious guilt'.

The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon—the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule—is now restored and in a completely new translation. Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic. In print continually since 1940, Darkness at Noon has been translated into over 30 languages and is both a stirring novel and a classic anti-fascist text. What makes its popularity and tenacity even more remarkable is that all existing versions of Darkness at Noon are based on a hastily made English translation of the original German by a novice translator at the outbreak of World War II. In 2015, Matthias Weßel stumbled across an entry in the archives of the Zurich Central Library that is a scholar's dream: “Koestler, Arthur. Rubaschow: Roman. Typoskript, März 1940, 326 pages.” What he had found was Arthur Koestler’s original, complete German manuscript for what would become Darkness at Noon, thought to have been irrevocably lost in the turmoil of the war. With this stunning literary discovery, and a new English translation direct from the primary German manuscript, we can now for the first time read Darkness at Noon as Koestler wrote it. Set in the 1930s at the height of the purge and show trials of a Stalinist Moscow, Darkness at Noon is a haunting portrait of an aging revolutionary, Nicholas Rubashov, who is imprisoned, tortured, and forced through a series of hearings by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and betrayals of a merciless totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Koestler’s portrayal of Stalin-era totalitarianism and fascism is as chilling and resonant today as it was in the 1940s and during the Cold War. Rubashov’s plight explores the meaning and value of moral choices, the attractions and dangers of idealism, and the corrosiveness of political corruption. Like The Trial, 1984, and Animal Farm, this is a book you should read as a citizen of the world, wherever you are and wherever you come from.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Koestler was living in the South of France working on Darkness at Noon. After retreating to Paris he was imprisoned by the French as an undesirable alien, even though he had been a respected crusader against fascism. A few years ago we were called the defenders of liberty - now we have become the scum of the earth. He was luckier, though, than many innocent refugees who were handed over to the Nazis for torture or execution. Scum of the Earth is more than the story of Koestlers survival among these horrors: it is also a description of what happens when a nation loses its honour and pride.

*The Act of Creation* begins where this view ceases to be true. Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behavior that dominate their lives. The study of psychology has offered little in the way of an explanation of the creative process, and Koestler suggest that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended - for example in dreams and trance-like states. Then the mind is capable of receiving inspiration and insight. Taking humour as his starting point, Koestler examines what he terms 'bisociative' thinking - the creative leap made by the mind that gives rise to new and startling perceptions and glimpses of reality. From here he assesses the workings of the mind of the scientific or artistic genius. The general reader as well as the reader with a deeper knowledge of the topics covered will find this richly documented study of creativity both illuminating and compelling. While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The phrase 'the ghost in the machine' was coined by Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, and was intended to point out the absurdity of traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism; presumably there was also an attempt to echo the phrase deus ex machina, or "god from the machine", i.e. an artificial solution to a complex problem. Koestler, in writing The Ghost in the Machine in 1967, appropriated Ryle's phrase, although he had a pretty low opinion of Ryle himself -- he dismissed him as a 'snickering' Oxford don with no knowledge of any of the sciences that would have given his ideas more weight. Ryle nevertheless had the philosopher's gift for analogy, and used a number of metaphors for the mind-body problem, all of which could have supplied titles: they included 'the sealed signal box', 'the two parallel theatres' and 'the horse in the locomotive'.

Arthur Koestler's first novel, set in the late Roman Republic, tells the story of the revolt of Spartacus and man's search for Utopia. The first of three novels concerned with the 'ethics of revolution', it addresses the age-old debate of whether the end justifies the means, an argument continued in his classic novels Darkness at Noon and Arrival and Departure.

Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universeIn this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

Arthur Koestler's publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests. The Trail of the Dinosaur gathers some of his best-known essays and speeches. The Trail of the Dinosaur , first published in 1955, contains a great deal of Koestler's thinking for the first ten years after the war – a 'farewell to arms' as he wrote in his preface. These essays deal with the political questions that obsessed him for the best part of a quarter of a century. The essays in 'The Trail of the Dinosaur' cover the decade 1946–55-the early or classical period of the Cold War. In that confrontation the West was on the defensive, and the majority of its progressive intellectuals were still turning a benevolently blind eye on Soviet foreign policy and the facts of life behind the Iron Curtain . In the dramatic contest between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which has been called the Dreyfus Affair of our century, progressive opinion stood firmly behind Hiss. And when, in the New York Times, I took Chambers' part, I became, if possible, even more unpopular among self-styled progressives than I had been before. In 1937, during the Civil War in Spain, I spent three months under sentence of death as a suspected spy, witnessing the executions of my fellow prisoners and awaiting my own. These three months left me with a vested interest in capital punishment-rather like 'half-hanged Smith', who was cut down after fifteen minutes and lived on.