Arthur Koestler

The author examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended-for example, in dreams and trancelike states.

The Act of Creation

Bringing the history of cosmology--from the Babylonians to Newton--to life in a masterly synthesis, Koestler shows how the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

The Sleepwalkers

The author examines recent developments in parapsychological research and explains their implications for physicists

The Roots of Coincidence

An examination of the human impulse towards self-destruction suggests that in the course of human evolution, a pathological split between emotion and reason developed

The Ghost in the Machine

Fred Uhlman

Traduit de l'Anglais par Léo Lack Agé de seize ans, Hans Schwarz, fils unique d'un médecin juif, fréquente le lycée le plus renommé de Stuggart. Il est encore seul et sans ami véritable lorsque l'arrivée dans sa classe d'un' garçon d'une famille protestante d'illustre ascendance lui permet de réaliser son exigeant idéal de l'amitié, tel que le lui fait concevoir l'exaltation romantique qui est souvent le propre de l'adolescence. C'est en 1932 qu'a lieu cette rencontre, qui sera de courte durée, les troubles déclenchés par la venue de Hitler ayant fini par gagner la paisible ville de Stuttgart. Les parents de Hans, qui soupçonnent les vexations que subit le jeune homme au lycée, décident de l'envoyer en Amérique, où il fera sa carrière et s'efforcera de rayer de sa vie et d'oublier l'enfer de son passé. Ce passé qui se rappellera un jour à lui de façon tragique.

L'ami retrouvé

A brand new edition of Arthur Koestler's gripping tale of arrest, imprisonment, and subsequent escape to London from Nazi-occupied France. Arthur Koestler is now an essential part of the English literary landscape both as political activist, controversialist and the author of Darkness at Noon. He stands beside George Orwell as one of the key writers of the twentieth century who embraced communism but would later turn against the partyand denounce the tragic distortions and abuses that had betrayed the great vision.

Scum of the Earth

Gün ortasında karanlık

ARROW IN THE BLUE is the first volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography. It covers the first 26 years of his life and ends with his joining the Communist Party in 1931, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny. In the years before 1931, Arthur Koestler lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the University if Vienna; a collective farm worker in Galilee; a tramp and street vendor in Haifa; the editor of a weekly paper in Cairo; the foreign correspondent of the biggest continental newspaper chain in Paris and the Middle East; a science editor in Berlin; and a member of the North Pole expedition of the Graf Zeppelin. Written with enormous zest, joie de vivre and frankness, ARROW IN THE BLUE is a fascinating self-portrait of a remarkable young man at the heart of the events that shaped the twentieth century. The second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography is THE INVISIBLE WRITING.

Arrow in the Blue

Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of twentieth-century man and his dilemma. ARROW IN THE BLUE ended with his joining the Communist Party and THE INVISIBLE WRITING covers some of the most important experiences in his life. We see him in Germany, Russia, England, France and Spain, working sometimes openly and sometimes underground for the cause in which he believed. This was the time of the 'seven years' night' over Europe - of Hitler's spectacular successes against the Western Democracies. They were also the years of the great Russian purges, which led to Koestler#s eventual break with Communism in 1938, after Hitler and Stalin between them had claimed the lives of most of his friends and relatives. This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It puts in perspective his experiences in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France (told at greater length in DIALOGUE WITH DEATH AND SCUM OF THE EARTH), and ends with his escape from Occupied France in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home. An epilogue brings the story up to 1953, when it was written. Koestler calls the book 'a typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in our time'. It has two main themes: the historical background against which the author developed, and an unsparing analysis of his intellectual and spiritual development.

The Invisible Writing

Fra Moskvaprocesserne i 1938-39 om den fremstående partifunktionær Rubashov, der anklages for kontrarevolutionær virksomhed

Ẓulmat dar nı̄mrūz

Peter Slavek, a European Communist, escapes to Neutralia after suffering under the Nazis

Arrival and Departure

Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation. A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.

A Novel

Darkness at Noon

First published in 1963, this is an enquiry into the state of Britain. It was edited by Arthur Koestler and contains essays by contributors who include Henry Fairlie, Malcolm Muggeridge, Goronwy Rees, Michael Shanks, Andrew Shonfield, Austen Albu, Aidan Crawley, John Cole, Hugh Seton-Watson, John Mander, John Grigg (Lord Altrincham), Cyril Connolly, Marcus Cunliffe, Alan McGlashan, Elizabeth Young and John Vaizey.

An Enquiry Into the State of Britain

Suicide of a Nation?

PROMISE AND FULFILMENT Palestine TO ABRAM AND JASHA WEINSHALL CITIZENS OF ISRAEL AS A TOKEN OF A QUARTER-CENTURY OF FRIENDSHIP ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MY sincere thanks are due to R. H. S. Grossman, M. P., and Messrs. Hamish Hamilton, for permission to use the long extract pp. 102-7 from Grossmans Palestine Mission to a member of the Israeli Foreign Office, who wishes to remain anonymous, for per mission to print his Report from Jerusalem pp. 234-8 to Mr. George Pape, Librarian of the Public Information Office in Tel Aviv, and Dr. G. Pollack of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, for valuable research work and to Miss Daphne Wood ward, for helping with the proofs. A. K. PREFACE THIS book consists of three parts, Background, Close-up and Perspective . The first part is a survey of the develop ments which led to the foundation of the State of Israel. It lays no claim to historical completeness, and is written from a specific angle which stresses the part played by irrational forces and emotive bias in history. I am not sure whether this emphasis has not occasionally resulted in over-emphasis as is almost in evitable when one tries to redress a balance by spot-lighting aspects which are currently neglected. But it was certainly not my intention, by underlining the psychological factor, to deny or minimize the importance of the politico-economic forces. My aim was rather to present, if I may borrow a current medical term, a psycho-somatic view of one of the most curious episodes in modern history. The second part, Close-up, is meant to give the reader a close and coloured, but not I hope technicoloured, view of the Jewish war and of everyday life in the new State. It opens and ends with extracts fromthe diary of my last sojourn as a war correspondent in Israel. The emphasis here is on life in the towns, with only occasional glimpses of the collective settlements, since I have given a detailed description of these in an earlier book. The third part, Perspective, is an attempt to present to the reader a comprehensive survey of the social and political structure, the cultural trends and future prospects of the Jewish State. I have tried to show elsewhere that the creative processes of the artist and the scientist follow the same mental pattern, and that the sciences may legitimately be called neutral arts, separated from the emotive arts not by any distinct barrier but merely by the quality of our emotive reactions. In this sense vii Viii PROMISE AND FULFILMENT history, too, is a neutral art with mythology and bardic folklore as connecting links to the emotive arts of drama and fiction. But the emotive neutrality which should characterize the chronicler is not the same thing as indifference, and his object ivity can only be the result of a subjective passion for the pursuit of truth. It is a poor sort of impartiality which stands outside the parties, untouched by their emotions the good judge, like the playwright and historian, absorbs the subjective truth con tained in each of the conflicting pleas, and his verdict is a syn thesis of their part-truths, not their denial. In other words, r objectivity is a state of balanced emotions, not an emotive vacuum. This book, then, should be regarded as a subjective pursuit of the objective truth. I lived in Palestine from my twentieth to my twenty-third year, as a farmer, tramp, and on various odd jobs finally as a foreign correspondent. Ihave since revisited the country at fairly regular intervals, and each of these visits provided an occasion not only to study developments in the country, but also my personal attitude to it. The last phase of this pilgrims progress through a thicket of emotive and ideo logical entanglements is summed up in the Epilogue. It may also be read as a prologue, and serve as an indication of the point of view from which certain controversial problems are treated in this book...

Promise and Fulfilment - Palestine 1917-1949

Thieves in the Night : Chronicle of an Experiment was written in 1946. Originally intended to be the first of a trilogy, Koestler later concluded that the book stood on its own and plans for further novels made redundant. Based on the author's own experiences in a kibbutz, it sets up a stage in describing the historical roots of the conflict between Arabs and Jewish settlers in the British ruled Palestine. The book tackles many subjects, such as Zionism and idealism. Koestler was Zionist early in life, but later abandoned the idea. The title is a Biblical reference, quoted on the title page: "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night." (2 Peter 3:10)

Thieves in the Night

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Ghengis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry.

The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage

The Thirteenth Tribe

İspanya'da Ölüm Güncesi

Memoirs covering period from the beginning of the present war until the fall of France.

Arthur Koestler

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