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With the precision of a bullet

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Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
Michael Scammell
(New York: Random House, 2009)

It takes talent to write about someone else’s interesting life in a book that is interesting itself. The biographer would have to be, say, an author, scholar and translator. Such a person could write a biography about an intellectual polyglot, polymath, “journalist, novelist, essayist, autobiographer, and writer of scientific speculations” — and Casanova.