Nicholas T. Parsons

Nicholas T. Parsons

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 the 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 18 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 more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide; Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019 he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).

VOX POPULI *

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ Students of pop song will know this pathos-ridden refrain from the 1970s hit song, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. Of course, the lyrics actually describe the life of a drifter: drugs, panhandling … the usual stuff. But for me it has always

‘Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues’*

Reflections on The Woke versus the West:Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age by John O’Sullivan During my student days in Oxford the distinguished poet Robert Graves was the university’s ‘Poet in Residence’. The duties of the person voted into this position did not seem unduly onerous in those days, but

AUSTRIANS AND HUNGARIANS: ENEMIES, NEIGHBOURS, FRIENDS

Mosaic of an Ambivalent Relationship In 1909, an English artist named Adrian Stokes and his Styrian wife Marianne published an account of their travels and painting expeditions in Hungary, chiefly Transylvania and Upper Hungary (now Slovakia). The prose is vivid, if a little mannered and occasionally rhapsodic. On the last

DE GAULLE AND CHURCHILL – POLITICAL CONFLICT IN A COMMON ENDEAVOUR

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism,when hate for people other than your own comes first.Charles de Gaulle1 You have enemies? Good.It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Winston Churchill On 18 June 1942, the second anniversary of his great Appel to the

THE BORIS EFFECT REACHES THOSE THE CENTRISTS HAVE ABANDONED

“As reliably as the announcement of the first cuckoo in spring, letters appeared in the liberal press after the Tory triumph in the British general election on 12 December 2019 complaining that the electoral system in the UK was dysfunctional and unfair. I think we can assume that the writers

A STORMY PETREL OF THE ACADEMIC WORLD – R.I.P. NORMAN STONE

“In private Norman was kind and generous and prepared to help students who showed promise. His asides entertained many of them: the man in the flesh was less of an activist throwing verbal bricks (many of them well deserved) through fashionable windows and more of an erudite overturner of applecarts.

JUDSON’S HISTORY OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE

“An imperial EU, if it is to function, will necessarily be authoritarian, since there is as yet no demos that would provide the basis for a genuine pan-European democracy. A partial solution is supposedly offered by ‘subsidiarity’, a notion founded in Catholic doctrine, which accepts that some issues are best