PAUL GILFILLAN is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His major work is A Sociological Phenomenology of Christian Redemption (2014). In 2021–2022, he was a visiting senior fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. He is currently conducting ethnographic research on a number of projects, including new forms of integral Catholicism and the emergence of post-liberal nationalism in the Scottish context.
DAVID MARTIN JONES is a political scientist, writer, and commentator. He is an honorary reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a visiting professor and teaching fellow in War Studies at King’s College, University of London. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, and has taught at the Open University, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Tasmania. His works include Political Development in Pacific Asia (1997); The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (2001); with N. Khoo and M. L. R. Smith The Rise of China and Asia Pacific Security (Edward Elgar, 2013); with M. L. R. Smith Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age (Macmillan, 2014); and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counter-Insurgency (Columbia, 2015). His most recent publication, History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics (C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd., 2020), examines the progressive ideas behind liberal Western practice since the end of the twentieth century. Currently he is director of research at the Danube Institute, Budapest.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI is the former editor-in-chief of Hungarian Review and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays, and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest between 1970 and 1989. He received research and teaching fellowships from the British Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, CIES, and The German Marshall Fund of the US. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara (1984–1985) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004–2009), and read his poetry in English widely in the US. In 1987, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In 1990–1994, he served as senior foreign policy adviser to the prime minister. In 1992–1996, he was the vice president of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created Duna Television, a cultural satellite channel. From 2000–2005 he was an adviser to President Ferenc Mádl. In 2012, he received Hungary’s Middle Cross with the Star and in 2005 the President’s Medal of Honour for his public and literary achievements. With Magyar Szemle, he received a Prima Prize in 2003. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. In 2016, he received the Janus Pannonius Prize for poetry translation.
LÁSZLÓ KÖVECSES is a doctoral candidate in history at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. His dissertation topic is national consciousness in early modern Hungary (1500–1800). In the academic year 2020–2021, he was the recipient of the Hungarian New National Excellence Programme scholarship. He holds a BA in History from Eötvös Loránd University and an MSc in Russian and Central and East European Studies from the University of Glasgow.
JÁNOS MARTONYI is a university professor (University of Szeged; ELTE University, Budapest; College of Europe in Bruges and Natolin; Central European University, Budapest), politician, attorney, international arbitrator, and author of numerous books, essays, and articles, primarily in the field of international trade law, competition policy and law, European integration and law, cooperation in Central Europe, global regulations, and international relations. He has served as commissioner for privatization (1989–1990); state secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations (1990–1991); state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1991–1994); managing partner at the law firm Martonyi and Kajtár, Baker & McKenzie, Budapest (1994–1998, 2002–2009); head of the Institute for Private International Law and International Trade Law at the University of Szeged (1999–2009); and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Hungary (1998–2002, 2010–2014). His awards include the Commander’s Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Széchenyi Prize, the Hungarian Corvin Chain Award for Merit, the Hungarian American Coalition 2016 Award, the Legion of Honour of France, the National Order of Merit of France, and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun of Japan, as well as British, Austrian, Polish, and Bulgarian state decorations.
GORDON MCKECHNIE was educated at the International School of Geneva and at the University of Oxford. After a career in banking, he became a partner of Deloitte and subsequently worked for the UK Treasury and held non-executive positions in the NGO and multilateral sectors. Among his current positions, he is chairman of the OECD’s Infrastructure and PPP Network and a member of the International Committee of Tearfund.
ANDRÁS NAGY is a writer, academic, associate professor at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, and senior research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Kőszeg. Besides his interest in literature, philosophy, and theatre, he is doing historical research focusing on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the United Nations. His last book was based on documents that became accessible only lately, shedding light on unknown aspects of the Cold War.
ZSOLT NÉMETH is a founding member of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Party) and member of Parliament since 1990. He studied political science at St Anthony’s College, Oxford University, as a visiting student in 1988 and 1989. He holds an MA in Economics and Sociology from Karl Marx (today Corvinus) University of Economic Sciences, Budapest. Since 2014, he has been chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and head of the Hungarian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe. He was chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee between 2002 and 2010, and parliamentary state secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1998 to 2002, and again between 2010 and 2014. In 2004, he was member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. He was one of the main sponsors of the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (1993), which granted individual and collective rights and the right to self-government to ethnic and national minorities living in Hungary, as well as of the act allowing non-resident Hungarians to apply for Hungarian citizenship if they are of Hungarian origin and speak the language (2010). He is also a founder of the Pro Minoritate Foundation, an honorary chief superintendent of the Calvinist Congregation of Transylvania, and a member of the Knight’s Order of the Johannites.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of National Review in New York, where he served as editor-in-chief for ten years. He was a special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organization dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher. Until 2011, he was the executive editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the president of the Danube Institute, Budapest, and an associate editor of Hungarian Review and Hungarian Conservative. His latest collection of essays, The Woke versus the West: Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age, was published in 2020.
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a British writer, teacher, and editor who has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the United States, where he gained a Master’s degree in History at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. A frequent contributor to the Hungarian Review and The Technoskeptic who has also been published in other journals and magazines, Reynolds particularly focuses on modern Central European history. He is the author of Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968 (Anthem Press, 2020), and Within the Grace of Meaning: Essays on Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Hungarian Review, 2020).
ILDIKÓ ROSONCZY is a historian and editor. She studied history and archival science at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She obtained her PhD degree from Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest. Her main research area is the Hungarian Revolution and the War of Independence 1848–1849, especially the Russian intervention in Hungary in 1849. Based on archival research in Russia, she published numerous essays in periodicals and books on this subject.
SÁRON SUGÁR is a research fellow at the Budapest-based think tank, Danube Institute. She studied international relations at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her main research include events in the Middle East, especially the Christian persecution in the region. She took part in the research project entitled ‘Anti-Semitism in Hungary: Appearance and Reality’ from which a two-volume book was published by Helena Historical Press in the US. Currently, she is participating in the research project titled ‘Attacks on Christian Communities and Institutions’.
NÓRA SZEKÉR is a historian and university professor, and studied history at Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Piliscsaba–Budapest), where she earned her PhD in 2009 on the Hungarian resistance during the Second World War. At present, she teaches modern history at the same institution. Her field of research also includes post-War history, the 1956 Revolution, and the Kádár era. She is a senior researcher at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian (Communist) State Security. Her publications include two books on the Hungarian Fraternal Community, a clandestine patriotic and anti-totalitarian network of the thirties and forties. She is editor of the secret records of prominent anti-Nazi politicians of the Horthy regime, the memoirs of Domokos Szent-Iványi (1913 and 2016), and the diaries of Ferenc Zsindely (2021).