Twenty-five years ago, Michael Scammell published a first-rate life of Solzhenitsyn, and seems to have been working ever since on this biography of Koestler. Almost 100 pages of notes record the interviews he has conducted, and the published or unpublished material in at least five languages he has tracked down. The book pulls off the difficult feat of doing justice to Koestler's achievements while making no attempt to hide that he was to blame for a good deal of the dislike and outright hostility that other people felt towards him. Altogether an impossible character, he was vain, quarrelsome, opinionated, and at the same time insecure. Sidney Hook, also no mean polemicist, said that Koestler could recite the two times table in such a way as to antagonise his audience. Koestler himself recognised that his inferiority complex was the size of a cathedral. A near alcoholic, he would drink disastrously, losing control, crashing his car, hitting his companions, making passes at any and every woman. Afterwards guilt rose in a tidal wave. Impulsive efforts at repentance led him to change wives, houses, countries of residence, in cycles that kept repeating. Scammell diagnoses Koestler variously as a pessimist, a romantic, an egotistical perfectionist, a manic-depressive, a walking bundle of raw nerve-endings. Several times he tried to commit suicide, in the end successfully. 

Sexual promiscuity seems to have been a defining characteristic, "pathological" in Scammell's view. A previous biographer accused Koestler of being a rapist, even a serial rapist, but the evidence for this is too slight to be believable. Seemingly some emotional balance went wrong in his youth, when for no discernible reason he decided that he could not love his mother and he always treated her abominably. In the lengthening trail of wives and mistresses he carried cruelty to the point of sado-masochism. If Scammell is right, here was a Don Juan whose hatred of women was the expression of self-love. 

A book of this length is bound to have mistakes. King Faisal of Iraq was not the son of Ibn Saud, Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy is not a novel, Galileo's villa at Arcetri is not outside Venice, for Lord Shelbourne and C. V. Wedgewood read Lord Selborne and C. V. Wedgwood, John Grigg was never a Member of Parliament, and so on. The big picture is right, however. "Absolutitis" left Koestler a victim, but also an invaluable witness. In a time when this mattered, he had the courage and the talent to describe the reality of Stalinism and Nazism as he had lived it. Written with the admiration for his writing and the regret for his personal flaws that Koestler deserves on both scores, this monumental biography ensures that he is not forgotten.