ARTHUR KOESTLER

Few people could have been more admired in print and less known in speech than this British citizen of Hungarian Jewish extraction who, not surprisingly, spoke English with a markedly foreign accent. But if he was unattractive and thus secretive in speech, he was more than adequately compensated for this disadvantage in prose, spinning, for a foreign-born journalist, some of the most word-perfect, complex, imaginative, and enlivening prose ever recorded in English letters.

First and foremost a philosopher, Koestler pursued his evolutionary and 'holonic' theories with a rigour, consistency, and patience seldom encountered in British philosophical writings. In this respect, he was closer to the French, particularly Sartre, with whom he was friendly for a time during his Paris years. But, for all his personal literary brilliance, Koestler was flawed, perhaps partly on account of his foreign origins, by pedanticism, by too great a respect for past thinkers like Darwin and Freud, and never really broke free of them to establish himself as a major thinker in his own right.

Yet I cannot deny that, for a time, his influence on me was considerable, even in politics, and I owe my own ideological position in part to his thinking, which served as a springboard to my intellectual freedom. Of all his books, probably Janus - A Summing Up (which I read, incidentally, before his much earlier The Act of Creation) had the most influence on me, though I also admired From Bricks to Babel, the more recently-published selective anthology spanning several decades. Koestler may not have been a genius of the first rank, but he was arguably one of the cleverest men of his time.