This is sober, well-judged work which only occasionally loses sight of its own importance, as, for instance, in the following bizarre claim about Darkness at Noon: "The most important fact about the novel is the one that is least remarked upon in crit-ical studies: the central character...is a Jew." But then Cesarani has little understanding of or interest in the fiction as fiction; it is mere code for the life and the ideas. And as a biographer, he is simply the wrong man for the job. He brings family values to bear on a man who for most of his life rejected them. He brings a hedge-lawyer's judgmentalism to bear on a divided, self-conflicted, often self-despising personality. He is a man who puts quotation marks around the phrase "night life." He thinks that contradictory opinions and contradictory behavior are best explained by hypocrisy. He dismisses Harold Harris's attempt to understand the Koestlers' joint suicide as "elegant," and then produces his own, which owes more to geometry than psychology. His expressions of sympathy for the women in Koestler's life come to seem patronizing; made uneasy by Koestler's dynamic attractiveness, he imagines that women can only have stayed with him if they were weak and he was a bully.