On the day before my first interview with Arthur Koestler I mentioned his name to a professor of physics at a leading British university with whom I was having lunch. He rose to it with great interest.

Surprisingly, he had not read Darkness at Noon or any of Koestler's other novels or his essays. He was not even aware that many people, including me, consider Darkness at Noon one of the great political novels, indeed one of the great novels, of the century and Koestler's two-part autobiography one of the great autobiographies. And he knew nothing of Koestler's extraordinarily eventful life, save the fact that, like most intelligent people, he was born Hungarian.

But my luncheon, companion had read one of Koestler's nonfiction books, The Sleepwalkers, which touched on his own field, and it was this that aroused his enthusiasm.

When Tunisian Prime Minister Hedi Nouira visits Washington in the final days of November, issues of human rights, American aid, and evolution toward a multiparty democracy are sure to arise.

Both constitutionally and politically Nouira is Tunisia's crown prince—the designated successor of ailing Habib Bourguiba, "president for life" of this Mediterranean country of six million.

But the events of last January, which saw more than a hundred deaths and brought the imprisonment of Tunisia's powerful trade union movement leadership, have left a certain tension in their wake. Unemployment, rising expectations, and a growing alienation from the single-party regime—the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD)—are contributing to destabilization in Tunisia.

The subject of nuclear energy, arousing hope and anxiety in almost equal degree, is of interest to all mankind. Of late, however, attention has focused on the implications of the spread of nuclear power and technology to Third World countries, and in that context the views of Pakistan—a developing country with similar economic compulsions—may be of some general interest.

Thirty years after Hiroshima-Nagasaki one sees nuclear energy being used beneficently all over the world in research institutions and hospitals, in farms and factories. But a number of recent developments have reawakened the fear and moral doubt concerning man's capacity to make wise use of the terrible power his intelligence has unleashed: the explosion by India of a nuclear device in 1974; disclosures about the real risks of accidents in power reactors; and the fear that terrorists, political or’ criminal, may obtain recourse to nuclear bombs to further their ends.

A word of explanation. Amid some controversy, historians have generally presented King Richard All of England as a thoroughly evil man who clawed his way to power over the corpses of his many victims and who was killed finally in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. These recently discovered memoirs reveal, however, that the crowned and ironclad man who died in that famous battle was really a loyal double on special assignment. Richard himself lived, not to fight another day, but to write his memoirs during his final years of secluded retirement in Cornwall, on the west coast.

The memoirs also make it perfectly clear that Richard was a man of exalted integrity, unimpeachable intentions, and sterling virtues, a hero whose reputation was irreparably blackened by malevolent and irresponsible chroniclers.

The brief but significant excerpts that follow are presented essentially unaltered, although the language has been modernized for easier reading and some of the gamier expletives have been deleted.

It is the best of times. Per capita food production in 1977 was near record levels in both developed and developing countries. World production of grains in 1977 was 9 per cent over 1974 production. World production in 1978 is forecast by the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service to be up 4 per cent over 1977, despite controls that reduced U.S. wheat production by 10 per cent. The foreign grain crop in 1978 is expected to establish a new record. The result is an anticipated 5 per cent boost in grain stocks carried into 1979. World grain stocks are expected to total 192 million metric tons by the beginning of crop year 1979 and constitute 14 per cent of utilization, compared to 11 per cent in 1975. Expected stocks will be near levels deemed adequate by U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization standards and more than adequate if based on an analysis by D. Gale Johnson of the University of Chicago and by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

One November afternoo|i in the heart of a Third World city a (farmer began the difficult exercise of leading his horse through a halfcircle. It was difficult because the cart drawn by the horse required a sizable turning radius, because the farmer made the turn while responding to a traffic policeman's choleric gestures, and because no man or horse can be complacent when conducting such a maneuver on the pavement of Sharia Tahrir against Onrushing waves of automobiles. Like many other Egyptian place names this one has political significance. Sharia Tahrir means Liberation Street—which would be an equally ironic designation for another street on another continent in another part of the Third World.

In six years of conducting research on America's poor Jews I have met no one more delightful than the seventy-year-old man I will call Yankel Kanter. As the sort of research I do is based on speaking with people over a long period of time, it is only natural that I would be especially attracted to such a man as Yankel. If the purpose of my work is to allow people to describe in their own words how their lives are being led, then Yankel, eager to talk, was the perfect person to participate in the research.

Over the years of our friendship Yankel has talked about a great many things, although never once about the death of his wife and children in a death camp in Poland. He is in his way, although he would never say this, a scholarly and learned gentleman whose immediate response to almost any question of mine was: “Oh you know, just the other night I was reading a book on that very subject.“

Ten years have passed since those brief, happy months in the sunshine of the Prague spring. Alexander Dubcek and the new leadership tried to move toward greater personal freedom and create “socialism with a human face,” but these buoyant expectations of a better future for the fifteen million people of Czechoslovakia were shattered by the massive surprise attack launched by the Soviet Union in August, 1968. During the last forty years Czechoslovakia has been a victim and a symbol of the aggressive power of the twin totalitarian scourges of this century — fascism and communism. In 1938 the divided and fearful democracies tried to appease Hitler by going back on their commitments to defend little Czechoslovakia. That action cost them the support of a brave nation and its fifty well-armed divisions. It also set the stage for a devastating world war that began less than one year later.

There is in this land a certain restlessness, a questioning,” said President Lyndon Johnson when he delivered his State of the Union message at the beginning of 1968. How right he was. And to his own question of “why, why this restlessness?” he responded: “Because when a great ship cuts through the seas, the waters are stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving….“

What Lyndon Johnson overlooked in his neat metaphor was that a lot of passengers on that ship were stirred and troubled, fearing that they were on a new Titanic setting due course for a large iceberg that was highly visible to them but apparently not to Captain Johnson and his crew.