In 1999, David Cesarani wrote a biography of Arthur Koestler. Arthur Koestler is now a writer who dimly rings a bell, but in the Cold War he was quite the righteous mandarin, just after George Orwell himself. That status of a man who told the truth about Stalinism was precious to a group that moved right in the seventies and eighties, and defended themselves by the retrospective moral condemnation of Stalinism (that was never accompanied by a retrospective moral condemnation of slaveholding, genocide, and colonial oppression as accomplished by the US – for to point at the U.S. was to engage in moral equivalency and other sins). Koestler, according to Cesarini, was not a nice guy. For instance, he was a pouncer – he would paw at women, and some women, including Jill Craigie, said he raped them. Think Bill O’Reilly, except more, what is the word, aggressive. Well, this was too much for the “liberal” NYRB, who set Julian Barnes to the task of defending Koestler from the lowminded and
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