<p>This paper discusses the complexity of female and Arab characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night. Through an analysis of three main characters (Dina, Ellen and the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh) and several minor ones, it shows that the allegation of contemporary reviews, and some works on Arthur Koestler ever since, that the novel is excessively built on stock characters is untenable. In fact, the representation of women and Arabs is both specific and detailed, in addition to the fact that these characters show a clearly detectable line of development, even if their initial presentation might in some cases be reminiscent of Petrarchan or other types.</p>

Arthur Koestler's The Call-Girls (1972) is, at present, mostly ignored, or if discussed, either dismissed wholesale, or approached only in terms of its role in the development of Koestler's political and philosophical thinking. The aim of this analysis is to show that it is possible to interpret the text as a highly specific campus novel, limited to a single setting: an academic conference. Although the conference's topic is "saving the world," the novel's characters neither achieve that aim, nor get any closer to a solution. Therefore, the book can be taken for a satirical treatment of the hypocrisy and futility of academic conferences, rather than a political plea, as previously understood.

Henry Innes MacAdam's relationship to the The Gladiators (1939) is of an unusual intensity and rarely paralleled devotion. Albeit only publishing his first article on the novel, to my knowledge at least, relatively recently (MacAdam 2006), he first read Koestler's story almost seventy years ago (84), and that reading had a momentous effect on his life: it sparked not only a lifelong fascination with the book itself, including corresponding with Koestler in the 1970s (87) and pursuing the decades-long project of reconstructing the story of Hollywood's abandoned project to film the novel, tracing and eventually retrieving its long-lost screenplay (MacAdam, Cooper, and Radford 2021), but it also caused MacAdam's "lifelong interest in Rome and Roman history" (MacAdam 2006, 85), leading to his decision to become an expert on ancient history and archaeology Notwithstanding his somewhat untraditional training for literary research, as a direct result of his fascination with the novel, Henry Innes MacAdam has become not only the foremost authority on The Gladiators but also one of the most prolific commentators of Arthur Koestler's fiction in English. Even prior to Outlook & Insight, MacAdam has co-authored a two-volume monograph and published at least seven articles on this book alone It is thus probably not too much of an exaggeration to claim that if Koestler's Spartacus story breaks free of such doubtfully deserved judgments as being "rather dated" (Scammell 2009, xix), "static and talky," with "problems of language and construction" (166), and "replete with anachronisms" (Cesarani 1998, 150) and re-emerges as an intriguing and complex historical novel, then it likely achieves that feat mostly thanks to MacAdam's efforts 1 1Mostly but not solely Others with an appreciation for The Gladiators include Jenni Calder

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Cities of Saviors is a short study of the urban spaces of E. E. Cummings’ poetry and Peter Ackroyd’s seminal novel, Hawksmoor. Although at first sight a comparison of these two authors might seem surprising, the analysis offered by this new book shows that such a reading can be revelatory for the understanding of both authors. Relying on close readings informed by the spatial theories of Mircea Eliade, Michel Foucault and Gaston Bachelard, it sheds light on a common understanding of space: one that is immersed in a dark sacrality. By doing so, it also radically reinterprets the oeuvre of both authors, in that it positions Cummings away from the accepted image of the neo-Romantic poet of transcendence and situates Ackroyd in the continuing tradition of (late) Modernism