"So who was Sevso? Judging from the magnitude of the treasure which is almost two times heavier than the whole Kaiseraugst Treasure, whose owner could have been a magister militum (master of soldiers) in or around 351 AD, we must think of a man at least of similar rank. Certainly, the Sevso Treasure can be compared to the Esquiline Treasure made during the middle of the 4th century AD whose owners – the Turcii – produced a consul and two prefects of the city of Rome."

"One member of our group of approximately forty managed to escape. Upon discovering the escape, our furious guards lined us up and planned to shoot us on the spot in retaliation. The guards were pointing the guns and waiting for the command to shoot when a higher-ranking officer appeared with orders to transport us to the Arrow Cross National Headquarters at 60 Andrássy Street."

"One day I noticed that our hog scalding tub was covered with a horse blanket. I lifted the blanket. In it lay the body of a young Russian. The corpse fitted the tub perfectly. We used to scald hogs in the tub. It became a coffin.Corpse in the tub and looted art in the attic! Death and Art. The aesthetic substitute for the reality made ugly by war. For the transient moment, art comes to predominate over war."

"When the communists called a strike against the industry and enforced their picket lines with goon squads, those who opposed the strike where Reagan worked found an underground route behind the lot into the studio facilities. Reagan insisted on riding in full view, the only one in a bus that drove straight into the studio front gate. People would see that he was not afraid of the thugs and their tactics. Again he was saying, this time by his actions,'You are not alone'."

"'Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.' Lord Palmerston formulated this maxim more than once. It has since become a commonplace, equally valid for Great Powers and for smaller states like Hungary. But first every nation has to make up its mind what those interests are. Peace and 8 HUNGARIAN REVIEW | January 2015 prosperity – that is the basic interest of all sensible countries. But how to achieve and maintain that – here is the rub, this is the crux of the matter."

"If one stands back and considers Hungary during the period 1914 to 1989 as the history of a family, then it consists of conscription into the Army, multiple injuries, dispossession of estates, bitter family quarrels, bouts of mental illness, fratricide, the loss of the family home, kidnapping by bandits, torture at their hands, a long period of imprisonment with hard labour, transfer into the care of a guardian corruptly administering the bankrupt estate, and finally a release into a bewildering and almost foreign world."