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Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual Paperback – 3 Feb 2011

4.8 out of 5 stars 6 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 720 pages
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber; Main edition (3 Feb. 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 057125599X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571255993
  • Product Dimensions: 15.5 x 5 x 23.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 523,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Magisterial and subtle biography ... this is a skillfully structured work ... most of Koestler's earlier biographies have homed in on his lechery, for all commercial reasons. This is a warts-and-all work, not with only warts. Koestler was a super-sophisticated man. At last, in Michael Scammell, he has a sophisticated biographer who can place his subject in context.' --Evening Standard

'Magisterial biography ... [Scammell s] book is an exercise in rehabilitation and will surely become the definitive life.' --John Carey, Sunday Times

'Powerful new biography ... this is an immensely thorough biography which explores the whole range of Koestler's achievements ... the research that has gone into this biography is prodigious.' --Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph Book of the Week

Book Description

Award-winning author Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual is the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler.

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5.0 out of 5 starsHe contained multitudes
By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER on 19 April 2011
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This is a masterly account and analysis of the life of a brilliant polymath, a deep and restless thinker, first, about the political and ethical problems of his time, and, later, about the place of humanity in the universe. He was an ex-Hungarian, an ex-Communist, an ex-Zionist. He was exuberantly "continental", a cosmopolitan, frequently moving homes from one country and even one continent to another; a journalist, a campaigner against capital punishment, a hectoring controversialist, a political novelist, a voluminous autobiographer. He was usually (but not always) selfish, financially generous, arrogant but self-critical, introspective, neurotic, a heavy drinker (and as such involved in several car accidents), manic-depressive, mercurial, sparkling, hot-tempered and uninhibited in behaviour, competitive, both repellent and charismatic, a thrice married, domineering and quarrelsome husband who treated his submissive wives as dogsbodies, a compulsive philanderer (in a notebook he listed "between a hundred and two hundred women" he had slept with by the time he was 35, and he kept this sort of thing up for years). Yet every time we think what a dreadful man he was, we have to remember the enormous number of establishment figures who, for all the quarrels they had with him, sought out his stimulating company and (if female) were open to be seduced by him. At least several of these women had the good sense to decline when, in later life, Koestler, often after the briefest of acquaintanceship, asked them to marry him.

The most dramatic years of his life were the 1930s and 1940s.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsImpressive and most enjoyable biography
By Catherine Schwanen on 4 Mar. 2013
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This is the best biography (and not only koestler's) that I ever read! It's very easy to read, you just can't put it down. The language is also beautiful (I am french and I certainly enriched my english vocabulary). What should be interesting for people who did not have much history lessons at school: you learn a lot about the communist party under Stalin, Zionism and the creation of the Israel state, the spanish civil war and the Mc Carthy - and that from an insider's point of view (Koestler's). Professor Scammel also analyses very finely Koesler's complex character and does not assert anything thast he has not carefully checked. That book is really a must, not only for Koestler fans, but for everybody with cosmopolitan interests.
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5.0 out of 5 starsMore than a biography - much, MUCH more
By Christopher H TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 20 Oct. 2012
This is one of the most impressive works of history and biography I have read over the last decade. It is far bigger than a study of one man prominent in international affairs. It plots out and explores political tensions in the mid 20th century showing what they looked like at ground level for a journalist living through momentous events.

There is the Spanish Civil War (K covered it, then was imprisoned by Franco and nearly executed), the flight of Central European Jews to Palestine (K went back and forth several times, in different capacities: emigrant, journalist, political player), the rise of Nazism (K watched it happen around him), the start of the Second World War (K was stuck in France initially, then got out), the experience of war from the Home Front, the political turbulence at the end of the war (K was involved with the Communists), the Cold War (disillusioned with Communism, K was a uniquely influential Cold Warrior), and much much more - the Secret Speech, Hungary, the Berlin Wall, its all there.

Along the way we meet so many of K's close friends (Sartre, Orwell, Camus, and many many more), even find out how Capital Punishment ceased in Britain (K personally master-minded much of the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment). Where might one stop in describing what this book covers, and how well it presents history as an urgently lived experience.

You must read this book. You owe it to yourself. You must must must! It is that good.

Fluently written - it is a joy to read - and systematically researched, it truly is a great book. No library covering history and international affairs in the mid 20th century is complete without it.
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