Arrow in the Blue

Description

The remarkable first autobiography by the internationally acclaimed author of Darkness at Noon The first volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. In 1931, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny. Before that point, he lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the University of 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.

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the University of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book in English, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

A brilliant and deeply moving record of a whole generation as well as of an individual * Observer * The cumulative effect is overwhelming * New Republic * He is a journalist of ideas on a very high level - the kind we lack and need in this country - who functions midway between the realms of art and of society, but whose function is indispensable, if thought is to be part of culture * Saturday Review * Perhaps the most remarkable autobiography since the confessions of Rousseau -- V. S. Pritchett * New Statesman *