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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.

THE POPULISM OF THE ELITES

Recent issues of HungarianReviewhave 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 the father and his two sons in the Laocoon statue, the coils wrap themselves around us and refuse to let us go. This issue is hardly an

THE NEW UTOPIA AND THE MIGRANTS

Utopia is always an important country, always one of the great powers. English columnist Frank Johnson Other things being equal, the editors of Hungarian Review would prefer to be dealing with topics other than migration. We have dealt with it in earlier issues in some detail, and the world offers

CROSSING THE FRONTIER

For almost a century “crossing the frontier” has been an almost omnipresent metaphor in poetic and intellectual life. That should not perhaps astonish us in the aftermath of a war that first destroyed the frontiers dividing Europe and then drew new ones in the devastated continent. Frontiers and the states

HUNGARY AND EUROPE UNDER SIEGE

Sometimes a political topic forces itself on our editorial attention and will brook no rival. Though we covered the topic of immigration fully in our last issue with articles by Mark Almond, László Földi and Ronald Majláth on its growing significance, augmented by an editorial on how the world solved

REMEMBERING ROBERT CONQUEST

The opening line in most obituaries of Robert Conquest, who died on August the third, described him as a “historian and poet”. That would be a capacious enough description for most men of letters. In Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, Charon keeps A. E. Housman waiting on the banks

HOW TO HELP REFUGEES – REALLY

Almost sixty years ago, four young Tory activists – Tim Raison, editor of a small conservative magazine; Christopher Chataway, a famous British athlete; Trevor Philpott, a journalist on Picture Post; and Colin Jones, a financial writer on the Economist – launched a campaign in Raison’s magazine, Crossbow, to make 1960

EDITORIAL NOTE

Small magazines are the neurons of civilisation. They transmit vital messages between different cultural, academic, scientific and practical disciplines in much the same way as neurons link different parts of the brain. By this service they make a civilisation from what might otherwise be mutually incomprehensible worlds: dance without music,

EDITORIAL NOTE

Europe and therefore Hungary face three serious crises in the coming decade: the energy crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and the crisis over the euro – even though Hungary, having retained the forint, will not be directly constrained by the financial and budgetary rigidities of the single currency. Monetary independence admittedly

EDITORIAL NOTE

As the whole world knows, Hungary and Europe this winter mark the anniversaries of two great cataclysmic events – the first fighting of the 1914–18 war and the final fighting of the Second World War. One hundred years ago Hungarian troops in the Habsburg Army were holding fast in what

EDITORIAL NOTE

One hundred years ago a war began that swept away imperial institutions and national powers that had appeared to be permanent, irremovable and deeply rooted structures of European life. To take the most dramatic example, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov dynasties – with all their aristocratic associations and bureaucratic stability