A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of...all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualised drama of prison psychology
Times Literary Supplement
[Darkness At Noon] is written from terrible experience. From knowledge of the men whose struggles of mind and body he describes. Apart from its sociological importance, it is written with a subtlety and an economy which class it as great literature. I have read it twice without feeling that I have learned more than half of what it has to offer me- Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, as he awaits death in a GPU prison
New Statesman
Along with <i>Animal Farm</i> and <i>1984, </i>this book formed part of the essential bookshelf of those intellectuals who repudiated their early illusions about the Soviet Union
- Christopher Hitchens, The Week
It brilliantly portrays the chilling tyranny of Soviet Communism
- Sandy Gall, The Week
One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it.
New Statesman