John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan

JOHN O’SULLIVAN (Liverpool, 1942) is editor-at-large of National Review in New York where he served as Editor-in-Chief for ten years. He was a Special Advisor 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 organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Vaclav Havel and Lady Thatcher. His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (on Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher), was published in Hungarian, too, in 2010. 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.

MAKING A VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM

“Our own world on 1 January 2020 was not quite so turbulent as that, but it was a great deal more turbulent than it had been on the same date in 2000 before the Russo-Georgian war, the 2008 financial crash, the travails of the euro (launched that day), the emergence

LOCKDOWN DIARY, BUDAPEST – 20 APRIL 2020

“‘Ghost trains’ and ghost buses are the most visible and oddly comforting -expression of Budapest’s lockdown. Because ‘essential workers’ still have to get to and from work, and the other city-dwellers may have good reasons to move around the city, the regular train and subway services are running as before,

ON THE TRIANON TREATY AND THE ABSURD STORMS OF CENTRAL EUROPE

“This first issue of Hungarian Review for 2020 is published on the 100th Anniversary of the Trianon Conference. As no Hungarian needs to be told, Trianon was the last of the “little Versailles” conferences that settled the disposition of territory and peoples between existing and new states in Central Europe

CELEBRATING HUNGARY: 1956 AND 1989

“Hungary’s young revolutionaries had changed how the world saw Goliath. Yes, but more importantly they had changed how the world saw Hungary and Hungarians, not as bitter-sweet ironists, witty pessimists with a death-wish, compromised realists, but as ordinary people who were also gallants, gambling against great odds and turning their

IN TIMES OF TRANSITION AND STABILITY

“Which kind of age are we living in today in what is called the post-Cold War world or even the post-post-Cold War world (the former having ended with the 2008 financial crash)? It is not all that odd that we now date our ages from 1989 rather than Anno Domini.

DIAGNOSING A MYSTERIOUS OPPRESSION

“My mind and editorial attention have been devoted in the last few weeks to attending a series of conferences in America, England, Croatia and Hungary on three large topics: immigration, the persecution of religious believers, especially Christians, and the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament. These topics stand independently of

CONSOLATIONS IN A SOMBRE TIME

It should be admitted from the start that this issue of Hungarian Review is a sombre one in which many of the articles are written in a minor key. To be sure, some of our authors offer a happy counterpoint – notes and themes of wit and charm and poetry

MAKING A VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM

“European political debate at present centres around the rising popular resistance to Brussels, to its growing centralisation of power, and to particular policies it has pursued (such as relocating migrants), often with little or no consultation, across the continent. It seems likely, though not certain, that this resistance will mean

REMEMBRANCE, ALL SOULS AND HEROES – EDITORIAL NOTE

“Memory and culture are therefore the key themes running through this issue. We wrote in the previous Review that we would restore the balance between the cultural and the purely political in later issues. It is neither possible nor desirable, of course, to omit the purely political in any review