Word: koestlers
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When 41 -year-old Humphrey Slater's Heretics (two novelettes in one volume) appeared last year, critics compared him to Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler. But, as readers of Conspirator will see, Slater does not share Koestler's determination to explore the more subtle and profound characteristics of the revolutionary man. Himself a former leftist enthusiast (he was the International Brigade's chief of operations in the Spanish war), Slater is content to dramatize his lore with such ability that few readers will be able to put down Conspirator before they have reached the last gasp...
...fact was, as most of the U.S. was beginning to realize, that there could be no dramatic shortcut to world peace. What the U.S. could and would have to do was well expressed by Hungarian-born Novelist Arthur Koestler, onetime Communist and now a crusader against Communism, arriving for his first visit...
...This is not 'a fight of white against black," said Koestler. "Eastern totalitarianism is black. ... On the other hand, American democracy is far from perfect. It is grey rather than white. But for us Europeans, from Prague to Rome, your democracy, however grey, means the whole hope of survival and salvation...
...disillusionment at year's end, Socialist Arthur Koestler wrote of Britain: "The problem of incentives is the most difficult and most important problem of Socialist economy [and yet] the massacre of incentives continues. The last bit of fun has been exiled from their drab lives in this country of Virtue and Gloom, with its mean vindictive Work or Want posters on every street corner; a slogan fit for a state orphanage or reformatory school, and which makes every self-respecting worker's stomach turn in disgust. . . . Two more years of this, and Labor will have irretrievably wasted...
Late in the 1930's, young U.S. leftist intellectuals began to feel badly shaken in their convictions, including the conviction that they knew what they were talking about. This was the period when Arthur Koestler and others broke the news about Communism, and this is the "middle of the journey" for Trilling's principal character...