Christopher Hitchens har en intressant text om Arthur Koestler i senaste numret av The Atlantic Monthly. En spännande figur, onekligen, den där Koestler. (Utdrag ur Darkness at Noon här och här.) He was periodically paralyzed by self-reproach and insecurity, and once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels (The Age of Longing) in which he described its style as modeled on that of a certain “A. Koestler,” whose writing, “lacking in ornament and distinction, is easy to imitate.” The author himself was written off as “a much afflicted scribe of his time, greedy for pleasure, haunted … Fortsätt läsa Hitchens om Koestler

Första inlägget om Darkness at Noon här. — ‘Apage Satanas!‘ repeated Ivanov and poured himself out another glass. ‘In the old days, temptation was of carnal nature. Now it takes the form of pure reason. The values change. I would like to write a Passion play in which God and the Devil dispute for the soul of Saint Rubashov. After a life of sin, he has turned to God—to a God with the double chin of industrial liberalism and the charity of the Salvation Army soups. Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He … Fortsätt läsa Ivanovs samtal med Rubashov i ”Darkness at Noon”

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940). Rubashovs dagbok inför det andra förhöret: “It has been said that No. 1 has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points … Fortsätt läsa Rubashovs dagbok