(2 of 2)
The Inquisition was a page of terrible madness in history, but it was not the same as the racial and class madness that drowned Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia in the blood of victims who outnumbered Torquemada's by more than 1,000 to one. Another ex-Communist did rather better. Using the heavier stones of current history, Arthur Koestler built Darkness at Noon into something more than an adult horror comic; he made his book a classic defense against the ogres of absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds and bodies of other men. Koestler brought a better mind to the subject; he began by renouncing the inquisitor within himself. Fast's book is no more than a tua culpa. In the person of Alvero, he seems to be trying to recover in the 15th century the innocence he lost in the 20th.