Left Book Club

Arrested by Franco's troops in 1937 while he was in Malaga as a foreign correspondent covering the civil war, and sentenced to death for espionage, Arthur Koestler awaited his execution in Seville prison for three months. A Spanish Testament’, first published in England in 1937, recounts in the form of a prison dialogue this waiting, this dialogue with himself, this meditation on life and death from which Koestler, a man of action, could not escape. The circumstances in which these pages were published at the time forced Koestler to silence certain essential facts, in particular his membership of the Communist Party, his links with the Komintern and his relations with the Spanish Republicans. In 1966, Koestler decided to correct his memoirs and present the reader with a complete version of the events, renamed Dialogue with Death*.