And this knowledge is extended to our sensibility through suffering and death. —Simone Weil On Tuesday February 9, 1937, Arthur Koestler was sitting in the library of a villa high on a hill overlooking the suburbs of the Spanish city of Malaga. General Franco’s forces had already slaughtered tens of thousands of Republicans, communists and civilians in various cities throughout the country in an attempt to suppress the working-class revolution. Two months later Franco was given a helping hand by Germany’s Luftwaffe, which proceeded to flatten the city of Guernica, leaving hundreds of civilian dead in its wake. Picasso’s famous…