Silone's reputation depended on three achievements: his novels of peasant life in Mussolini's Italy; his political essays; and an almost saintly integrity. In my student youth, dog-eared editions of his early novels—now re-issued as The Abruzzo Trilogy with a perceptive and simpatico foreword by Alexander Stille—were handed around like despatches from the anti-fascist front-line. (They had an added cachet of being forbidden fruit: the Stalinists did not approve.) His essays—at once anti-fascist and anti-communist—were never as revered as the novels, but they were still earnestly read. His reputation for adamantine integrity ensured that. He was as close as Italy has come to a Solzhenitsyn.

But some five years ago, two Italian historians began publicizing in the late Renzo de Felice's revisionist journal Nuova Storia Contemporanea, their research in the archives of the fascist political police. It documented, they claimed, Silone's work as a police informer. In the ensuing uproar, amid charges and counter-charges of misinterpretation, ignorance disenchanted and changed sides, while others found new depths in Silone's work. At the very least, established opinions had to be reconsidered.

I never met Silone (who died in 1978) but I interviewed Darina in the course of my research for The Liberal Conspiracy, an appraisal of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was in 1984 in Geneva in a private hospital where she was to have a foot operation. She was a vivacious Dubliner, auburn-haired, tall and handsome. She told me about an article she had written on Silone's last hours, how to her surprise his dying words were in French ("C'est fini. Je meurs.") and how she had recited the Lord's Prayer over his corpse. (They had been married thirty-four years. There were no children; it was said to be un mariage blanc.) "There is no single truth about Silone," she said, "only many truths. He was a little crazed."

But a passing remark leads to my footnote. I asked her about one of her 1951 letters that I had found in the Congress for Cultural Freedom archives in Chicago. In it she had outlined to the Executive Committee, in Paris, Silone's success in encouraging the defection of intellectuals from the Communist Party of Italy. She had no memory of this letter, she told me. Then she added, as if in an aside: "Silone was no above getting me to sign his letters." I put this down as a Silonian idiosyncrasy and thought little about it.

But it kept coming back and sometimes coloured my research. Was there something cagey about the great man? Soon afterwards, when I was browsing the Arthur Koestler papers in London, I came across a note which the militant anti-communist Koestler had scribbled to a companion in Berlin in 1950 at the founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). It was the very moment of the outbreak of the Korean War. Silone, an uncompromising anti-Stalinist long before Koestler, was delivering a mild and conciliatory speech. "I always wondered," Koestler scrawled, "whether basically Silone is honest or not. Now I know he is not."