Setting
Darkness At Noon is an allegory set in the USSR (not named) during the 1938 purges, as Stalin consolidated his dictatorship by eliminating potential rivals within the Communist Party, the military, and the professions. None of this is identified explicitly in the book. Most of the novel occurs within an unnamed prison and in the recollections of the main character Rubashov.
Koestler drew on his experience of being imprisoned by Francisco Franco's officials during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his memoir Dialog with Death. He was kept in solitary confinement and expected to be executed. He was permitted to walk in the courtyard in the company of other prisoners. While not beaten, he believed that other prisoners were.
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““Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them tonight,
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With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow....””
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“We believe that Carlyle has, after all, more readers, and is better known to-day for this very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and naturalness.”
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