That other self-reproaching hedonist, Cyril Connolly, also gets a stiff wigging for "indolence and general uselessness." Uselessness? Connolly was a fine critic, an important literary editor (printing, inter alia, Koestler's early warning about the Nazi death camps), a key promoter of modernism, and the author of at least one book that has lasted half a century. This doesn't impress Cesarani, who can spot a pleasure-monger at a hundred paces. Connolly and his pal Peter Quennell (another good critic, editor, and biographer) hit the discard pile for being "louche, posturing, ineffectual underachievers." 

But what about the rape? In August 1998 Jill Craigie, filmmaker wife of Michael Foot, the one-time leader of the Labour Party, told Cesarani that in May 1952, after a pub-crawl in Hampstead (during which she drank only ginger beer), Koestler attacked and raped her at her flat. She did not tell anyone, not even her husband, for nearly fifty years; obviously, there were no witnesses, no police report, no corroborating evidence. She died in December 1999. Her account, though it stands by itself, sounds absolutely true. (After the pub crawl Koestler bullied her into making lunch for him, presumably as a way of getting into her flat. Consider this detail no one could ever have made up: "After the meal Koestler helped to wash up.") There seems further evidence—though in any case Cesarani rushes to judgment—that Koestler was sexually violent toward women at other times.