May I begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak on this occasion. My credentials for doing so are slight. I am neither Hungarian, nor a poet, nor a novelist, nor a writer of imaginative and creative works, but a journalist and cold-blooded political analyst. So my only justification for being here is that I believe this book to be
One of the oddities of the modern world is that the same people will greet the same statement with either applause or excoriation depending on who is making it. If Viktor Orbán (for instance) were to say: “in the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via
There is a long list of gloomy quotations that writers on national and international politics keep handy for those occasions when nations and empires are suffering from sharp systemic upheavals. My own favourite is a line from the play, Juno and the Paycock, which Irish playwright Sean O’Casey puts into the mouth of an amiable Dublin wastrel, “Captain Jack” Boyle, in
Of all the bonds that combine to sustain a nation, memory is perhaps the most essential. It ensures that most of the other bonds – language, loyalties, poetry and songs, shared sacrifices – are extended through time. They continue to live when the present moment fades. It may even be that the memory of a shared past unites people far more deeply than the experiences it preserves did at the time. A wedding
Remembrance is the theme of this Hungarian Review, and it is so to a degree we deeply regret. It was always our intention to make this issue part one of a two-part series on recollections of – and reflections on – the Hungarian Revolution. 1956 is one of the most
October/November 1956 occurred at the exact moment that I was entering both actual and political adolescence. Boys of my age — I became fourteen in April of that year — were fighting and ferrying the wounded in Budapest that Fall. It was a crash course in political maturity. I was
Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013. She is still close to us. Historical judgements about her are still likely to be controversial. But it is already clear that Margaret Thatcher has left a legacy. That is not as normal, let alone as inevitable, as you might suppose. Very few prime
Marshal Foch once remarked of the graduates of France’s Saint-Cyr military academy: “They know everything. Unfortunately they don’t know anything else.” We can be fairly certain this was not meant as praise. Foch probably thought of the graduates as apprentice intellectuals rather than as future generals. He was noting a
In the first few pages of this important book, Ryszard Legutko describes the oddity whereby former communists adapted far more easily and successfully than former dissidents and anti-communists to the new liberal-democratic regimes established in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Others have
Recent issues of Hungarian Review have been heavily preoccupied with the migrant crisis as it affects Hungary and Europe. We wish it had been otherwise. Some days the editors feel as if they were wrestling to escape its coils and move towards more inspiring and lighter topics, but as with
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