PÉTER ÁKOS BOD (Szigetvár, 1951) economist, university professor. He worked in economic research at the Institute of Planning, Budapest, taught economics in Budapest and in the US before 1989. He was Minister of Industry and Trade between 1990 and 1991, and Governor of the Hungarian National Bank between 1991 and 1994. In 1995–1998, he was member of the Board at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (London), representing East Central European countries. At present, he is director of the Institute of Economics at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is vice chairman of the Hungarian Economic Society, sits on editorial boards of Hungarian journals (incl. this Review). His major publications include A vállalkozó állam [Entrepreneurial State], 1987; A pénz világa [The World of Money], 2001; Gazdaságpolitika [Economic Policy], 2002; Közgazdaságtan [Economics], 2006.
FERENC BÓNIS (Miskolc, 1932), musi- cologist, university teacher. He received his degree from the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in 1957. His main field of research focuses on the history of Hungarian music between the 16th and 20th century. He is the author of numerous books and series including Élet-Képek: Bartók Béla (2006) [Scenes from the life of B. B.], From Mozart to Bartók (2000), Hungarian Musicology, a series collecting the works of classical masters of Hungarian music from 1959, and Hungarian Studies in Musicology from 1968.
NORMAN DOIDGE, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, essayist and poet, on faculty at the Departments of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and, Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. His book, The Brain That Changes Itself, on neuroplasticity, has been described by neurologist Oliver Sacks as “Fascinating… a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain”. The Times of London has written, “Brilliant… Doidge has identified a tidal shift in basic science… the implications are monumental”. It is an international and New York Times Bestseller, translated into over 20 languages, including Hungarian. His next book on the brain will be released in English, in January.
JÁNOS EISLER (Budapest, 1942), museologist and art historian, focusing on Central European Gothic and Italian Renaissance Art. He is the author of several monographs (Pál Lőcsei, 1975; Stephan Lochner, 1984; Rembrandt and 17th Century Dutch Painting, 2005) and a great number of scholarly articles published in the Bulletin du Musée des Beaux-Arts, Acta Historiae Artium, Ars Hungarica, etc.
GERALD FROST is a journalist who has written widely about domestic and international politics. He has been Director of the London-based Centre for Policy Studies (1992–5) and of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies (1980–92) which he founded. He has written widely for British, American and European newspapers and magazines including Encounter, Standpoint, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal and Politique internationale. His publications include Hubris: The Tempting of Modern Conservatives, Anthony Fisher: Champion of Liberty and Too “nice” to be Tories: How the Modernisers have damaged the Conservative Party (with Anthony Scholefield). From 2002–2009 he was editor of the fortnightly publication euro-facts. He is presently deputy director of the Danube Institute.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review and of Magyar Szemle, is the author of eleven collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1970–1989. 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 (1984–85) 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 1990–94, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. In 2000–2005 he was an Advisor 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.
NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford, he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as Reader in English at the University of Pisa before returning to UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some 17 books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the “system change” of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for 20 years. His recent books are Worth the Detour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, and Vienna: A Cultural History Signet (Oxford University Press). Italian edition Vienna: Ritratto di una città (Odoya, Bologna).
IGOR POMERANTSEV (Saratov, 1948) is a poet, critic, playwright and broadcaster. He broadcast with the Russian Service of the BBC in the early 1980s, and since 1987 he has worked with Radio Liberty in London, Munich and Prague. He is also the editor and presenter of the radio magazine “Above the Barriers”. He is the author of the radio plays “Love on Short Waves”, “Sweethearts of Mr Fabre”, “Can You Hear Me?” and of several books of prose, poetry and essays, including books on the radio: News, Radio “C” and Inside Lyrics. He is a wine critic and the author of “Dry Red”.
JOHN RIDLAND was born in 1933 in London, England, of Scottish ancestry. He calls himself an Anglo-Californian immigrant. He received a PhD in English Literature at Claremont Graduate School in 1964. Before finish- ing the degree, he began teaching at UC Santa Barbara, which remained his base for 43 years. Since retiring in 2004–05 he has been writing and translating widely, publishing his own poems in Happy in an Ordinary Thing (2013) and various magazines including The Hudson Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, River Styx, and Per Contra (online, Issue 31). In 1999 Corvina Press published his translation of Petőfi’s János Vitéz as John the Valiant, with thirty illustrations by Peter Meller, for which he received the Gold Medal of the Arpad Academy in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bálint Balassi Sword Award. With Peter Czipott he has translated a volume of poems by Sándor Márai, The Withered World (Alma Classics, London, 2013) and another by Miklós Radnóti, All That Still Matters at All (New American Press, 2014).
GEORGE SCHÖPFLIN (Budapest, 1939) has been a Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz since 2004. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1962, and did his postgraduate studies at the University of Bruges. He worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1963–1967) and the BBC (1967–1976). He taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London from then on, becoming Jean Monnet Professor of Politics there from 1998 to 2004. He is active in the Constitutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs Committees of the European Parliament. He is also the author of many articles and books, including Politics in Eastern Europe 1945–1992 (Blackwell, 1993), Nations, Identity, Power (Hurst, 2000). His latest book, The Dilemmas of Identity has already appeared in Hungarian as Az identitások dilemmája (Attraktor, 2004).
LÁSZLÓ VÉGEL was born in 1941 in Szenttamás (Srbobran), then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Now he lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. He is a novelist, a play-wright and an essayist. His main works include the novels Egy makró emlékiratai [Memoirs of a Macro], Áttüntetések [Fade-ins], Bűnhődés [Punishment], Neoplanta avagy az Ígéret Földje [Neoplanta or the Promised Land], a chronicle titled Exterritórium, and a selection of essays published under the title Hontalan esszék [Homeless Essays].
DONALD WESLING, poet and professor at the University of California at San Diego is best known for his pio- neering books on modern poetics and prosody. His most recent scholarly book, published by Rodopi (Amsterdam, 2008) is Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary.