Spanish Testament

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…