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).

CC: CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.(Mark Twain) Climate change (CC) is not exactly a new phenomenon: the climate has been “changing” for four and a half billion years, “change” being what climate does. However it was officially discovered as an imminent threat to the planet and

2014.07.06.

DILEMMAS OF AUSTRIAN IDENTITY – ALFRED GOUBRAN’S IDIOTIKON: DER GELERNTE ÖSTERREICHER

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897) It is an intriguing title, Der gelernte Österreicher (Braumüller, 2013), with its allusive irony, as in a gelernter Tischler (trained carpenter) or (like the current Mayor

2014.06.06.

HUNGARIAN REVIEW is
published by BL Nonprofit Kft.

Editorial office: 24 Eötvös Street, Budapest, 1067, HUNGARY
E-mail: hungarianreview@hungarianreview.com

Publisher: Gergő Kereki
Editor-in-Chief: Tamás Magyarics
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: István Kiss
Editors-at-Large: Gyula Kodolányi, John O’Sullivan
Managing Editor: Ildikó Geiger