Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, the novel that did more than any argument to turn Western opinion against the Moscow trials. He was born in Budapest, was in Palestine as a Zionist and then a correspondent, joined the German Communist Party in 1931, travelled through the Soviet Union during the Ukrainian famine and said nothing about it at the time, and was sentenced to death by Franco's forces in Spain in 1937 and held for months under daily executions before being exchanged. He left the party after the purges. Darkness at Noon, written in German in 1940 while he expected to be arrested in France, follows an old Bolshevik called Rubashov through interrogation to a confession he knows to be false, and its argument is that the logic of the revolution itself produced the confession rather than torture alone. The original manuscript was lost and the book existed for sixty years only in his partner Daphne Hardy's English translation, until a German copy was found in a Zurich library in 2015. He was one of the six contributors to The God That Failed. His later work on science and the paranormal was less well received. He and his wife killed themselves together in 1983; he had Parkinson's and leukaemia, she was healthy and fifty-five, which has troubled his readers ever since. Allegations of rape made after his death by the biographer David Cesarani, and an accusation by Jill Craigie, have changed how he is read and led to the removal of a bust in Edinburgh. His archive is at Edinburgh University, to which he left his estate to fund a chair in parapsychology. Darkness at Noon is credited by several French historians with helping defeat the Communist Party in the 1946 referendum.

• Lived: 1905 CE – 1983 CE
• Nationality: Hungarian
• Roles: writer