On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was shot and killed in the hallway outside his office. The assassin, an unemployed man who had been expelled from the ...

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now ...