Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. He wrote journalism, novels, social philosophy, and books on scientific subjects. He was a Communist during much of the 1930s and remained politically active until the 1950s. He wrote a number of popular books, including Arrow in the Blue (the first volume of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (a collection of essays, many dealing with Communism), The Sleepwalkers (A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe), The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe giving a new theory of the origins of the Jews of Eastern Europe. His most famous work, the novel Darkness at Noon about the Soviet purges of the 1930s, ranks with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional treatment of Stalinism. He also wrote Encyclopædia Britannica articles.

Life
He was born Kösztler Artur (Hungarians put the surname first) in Budapest, Hungary to a German-speaking Hungarian family of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father, Henrik, was an industrialist and inventor whose business ideas revealed flawed judgement; for example, he invested for a while in the manufacture of a kind of radioactive soap. When Artur was 14, his family moved to Vienna, Austria. In 1918, Hungary obtained its independence from Austria and flirted for a while with Bolshevism.

Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became involved in Zionism. After completing his studies, he worked as a news correspondent. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate of Palestine, partly in a kibbutz. He joined the German Communist Party in 1931, but left it after the Stalinist purges of 1938. During this period he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and climbed Mount Ararat in Turkey. In Turkmenistan, he met the black American writer Langston Hughes. In 1931, he was a member of a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.

In his memoir The Invisible Writing, Koestler recalls that during the summer of 1935 he "wrote about half of a satirical novel called The Good Soldier Schweik Goes to War Again..... It had been commissioned by Willy Münzenberg [the Comintern's chief propagandist in the West] ... but was vetoed by the Party on the grounds of the book's 'pacifist errors'..." (p. 283).

Soon after the outbreak of World War II, the French authorities detained him for several months in a camp for resident aliens at Le Vernet in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains. Upon his release, he joined the French Foreign Legion. He eventually escaped to England via Morocco and Portugal. In England, he served in the British Army as a member of the British Pioneer Corps, 1941-42, then worked for the BBC. He became a British subject in 1945. He returned to France after the war, where he rubbed shoulders with the set gravitating around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One of the characters in de Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins is believed based on Koestler.

He returned to London and spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing. He was made a CBE in the 1970s. In 1983, Koestler, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, committed joint suicide by taking an overdose of drugs with his third wife Cynthia. He had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia, and in 1981, had become vice-president of "EXIT", a British group campaigning for it. His will endowed the chair of parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Multilingualism
In addition to his mother tongue German, Koestler became fluent in Hungarian, English, and French, and knew some Hebrew and Russian. His biographer David Cesarani claims there is some evidence that Koestler may have picked up some Yiddish from his grandfather. Koestler's multilingualism was principally due to his having resided, worked, and/or studied in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Palestine (pre-independence Israel), the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France, all by 40 years of age.

Though he wrote the bulk of his later work in English, Koestler wrote his best-known novels in three different languages: The Gladiators in Hungarian, Darkness at Noon in German (although the original is now lost), and Arrival and Departure in English. His journalism was written in German, Hebrew, French and English. He claimed to have produced the first Hebrew language crossword puzzles.

Women
Koestler was married to Dorothy Asher (1935-50), Mamaine Paget (1950-52), and Cynthia Jefferies (1965-83). He also had a very short fling with the French writer Simone de Beauvoir, one that may explain the mutual animosity between him and Jean-Paul Sartre. David Cesarani claimed that Koestler beat and raped several women, including film director Jill Craigie. The resulting protests led to the removal of a bust of Koestler from public display at the University of Edinburgh.

Questions have also been raised by his suicide pact with his last spouse. Although he was terminally ill at the time, she was apparently healthy, leading some to claim he wrongly persuaded her to take her own life.

Mixed legacy
Just as Darkness at Noon was selling well during the Cold War of the 40s and 50s, Koestler announced his retirement from politics. Much of what he wrote thereafter revealed a multidisciplinary thinker whose work anticipated a number of trends by many years. He was among the first to experiment with LSD (in a laboratory). He also wrote about Japanese and Indian mysticism in The Lotus and the Robot (1960). He did not merely arrive at different answers to accepted questions; rather, he tended to ask questions that no one else thought to ask.

This originality resulted in an uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Some of them, such as his work on creativity (Insight and Outlook, Act of Creation) and the history of science (The Sleepwalkers), are arguably brilliant and challenge us to readjust our thinking. Some of his other pursuits, such as his interest in the paranormal, his support for euthanasia, his theory of the origin of Ashkenazi Jews like himself, and his disagreement with Darwinism, are more controversial.

Politics
Koestler was involved in a number of political causes during his life, from Zionism and communism to anti-communism, voluntary euthanasia and campaigns against capital punishment, particularly hanging. He was also an early advocate of nuclear disarmament.

Journalism
Until the bestseller status of Darkness at Noon made him financially comfortable, Koestler often earned his living as a journalist and foreign correspondent, trading on his ability to write quickly in several languages, and to acquire with facility a working knowledge of a new language. He wrote for a variety of newspapers, including Vossische Zeitung (science editor) and B.Z. am Mittag (foreign editor) in the 1920s. In the early 1930s, he worked for the Ullstein publishing group in Berlin and did freelance writing for the French press.

While covering the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, he was captured and held for several months by the Falangists in Málaga, until the British Foreign Office negotiated his release. His Spanish Testament records these experiences, which he soon transformed into his classic prison novel Darkness at Noon. After his release from Spanish detention, Koestler worked for the News Chronicle, then edited Die Zukunft with Willi Münzenberg, an anti-Nazi, anti-Stalinist German language paper based in Paris, founded in 1938. During and after WWII, he wrote for a number of English and American papers, including The Sunday Telegraph, on various subjects.

Science
During the last 30 years of his life, Koestler wrote extensively on science and scientific practice. The post-modernist scepticism colouring much of this writing tended to alienate most of the scientific community. A case in point is his 1971 book The Case of the Midwife Toad about the biologist Paul Kammerer, who claimed to find experimental support for Lamarckian inheritance.

Mysticism and a fascination with the paranormal imbued much of his later work, and greatly influenced his personal life. He left a substantial part of his estate to establish the Koestler Institute at the University of Edinburgh dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomena. His The Roots of Coincidence centered on yet another line of unconventional research by Paul Kammerer, this time his claim of a quantum theory of coincidence or synchronicity, a theory Koestler evaluated in light of the writings of Carl Jung. More controversial were Koestler's studies of levitation and telepathy.

Judaism
Although a lifelong atheist, Koestler's ancestry was Jewish. His biographer David Cesarani has claimed that Koestler deliberately disowned his Jewish ancestry.

Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe advanced the controversial thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but from the Khazars, a Turkic people in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the 8th century and were later forced to move westwards into current Russia, Ukraine and Poland.

Koestler stated that part of his intent in writing The Thirteenth Tribe was to defuse anti-Semitism by undermining the identification of European Jews with Biblical Jews, with the hope of rendering anti-Semitic epithets such as "Christ killer" inapplicable. Ironically, Koestler's thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not Semitic has become an important claim of many anti-Semitic groups. Some Palestinians have eagerly seized upon this thesis, believing that to identify most Jews as non-Semites seriously undermines their historical claim to the land of Israel.

The thesis of The Thirteenth Tribe has since been criticized. To date, the genetic evidence has been inconclusive. Some researchers claim to find a Middle Eastern genetic element in virtually all Ashkenazim. Others note both Turkic words and Turkic genetic markers in these populations. But the usefulness of genetic markers in determining ancestry can be problematic; for instance, Ashkenazim also display a high level of similarity to the genetic markers of Khoisan Bushmen in Southern Africa. A thorough review of the scientific literature can be found at Khazaria.com.

When Koestler resided in Palestine during the 1920s, he lived on a kibbutz, an experience forming the basis of his unfinished Thieves in the Night. His view of Israel was that it would never be destroyed, short of a second Shoah. He supported the statehood of Israel, but opposed a diaspora Jewish culture. In an interview published in the London Jewish Chronicle around the time of Israel's founding, Koestler asserted that all Jews should either migrate to Israel, or assimilate completely into their local cultures. Koestler was also no dogmatic Zionist; for instance, he proposed that Israel drop the Hebrew alphabet for the Roman.

Hallucinogens
In November, 1960, Koestler participated in Timothy Leary's early experiments with psilocybin at Harvard. According to fellow participant Charles Olson, Koestler was distressed by the effects of the drug and isolated himself in an unfurnished bedroom in the Cambridge house Leary used for his project. Koestler again experimented with psilocybin at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, comparing this trip to Walt Disney's Fantasia.

He wrote about this experience in an article about the drug culture titled Return Trip to Nirvana, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 1967. This article challenged Aldous Huxley's defence of drugs in his The Doors of Perception. "I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system."

Cultural influence
In his younger days, the singer Sting was an avid reader of Koestler. His band of the time, The Police were to name one of their albums Ghost in the Machine after one of Koestler's books. The title Synchronicity was also inspired by Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, which mentions Carl Jung's theory of the same name. Koestler knew little about the burgeoning New Wave music scene, and is alleged to have said:

Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.

The cyberpunk manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell was also inspired by Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine.

Inspector Finch can also be seen reading a copy of The Roots of Coincidence in the graphic novel, V for Vendetta. Koestler is referenced several times in the work.

Quotations

"The Revolutionary’s Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age.... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers’ blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text."

"If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveller's eye, determine the direction of the journey."

"The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations."

"Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not."