Michael Scammell notes, at the end of this authorized biography to which he devoted some two decades’ work, that the centenary in 2005 of Arthur Koestler’s birth was “virtually ignored in Britain and the United States.” Yet, after reading this chronicle, the judgment of the Paris satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné, in 1981, still seems unchallengeable to me. The newspaper, on publication of the French edition of From Bricks to Babel, an extensive selection of Koestler’s writing, compared his work to a mirror held up to the twentieth century, accompanied by the thoughts of the mirror’s holder. That opinion was delivered before Koestler’s double suicide with his wife Cynthia, in 1983, which contributed significantly to his posthumous disparagement and decline in literary standing. Still, it is hard to evade the conclusion that faults in Koestler were characteristic of the time more than the man, and that however questionable aspects of his life may have been, he faithfully embodied the contradictions of his century.

Koestler was born in Budapest to a family of nonobservant Jews. His mother was Austrian in culture—she had once had an unproductive therapeutic session with Sigmund Freud—and his father Hungarian by assimilation. He came into the world, an only child, just as the first great Russian revolutionary convulsion of the twentieth century sharpened awareness of the critical situation of Eastern European Jewry, anticipating the vigorous relevance in succeeding years of two ideologies promising redemption—Leninism and Zionism—one destined to failure, one to success.