The British Honours system is puzzling. A German might wonder why make Dahrendorf (a now forgotten Anglo-Hamburger left-liberal) a Baron, and Popper only a knight? But at least Karl Popper got something. And speaking of Dahrendorf, what of other distinguished Central European emigrants, like Sir Arthur Koestler, Sir Leszek Kołakowski,
We have just passed an important anniversary, the 150th, in Hungarian history. On 8 June 1867, the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, was crowned King of Hungary. It was a lavish ceremony, the great Hungarian aristocrats in their national finery, in Matthias Church, and Franz Liszt composed a mass for the occasion. After it, Franz Joseph mounted a horse, and galloped
With Nobel Prize winners and businessmen all over the world, with a NATO army and locally produced aircraft, Turkey is easily the most successful Moslem country. But the problems begin with this statement. Have the Turks a native talent for adapting to whichever empire they happen to encounter, in modern
“How could the British make Dahrendorf a baron but Popper only a knight?” said a surprised German politician. He did not understand the British honours system, and indeed few people do. Eric Hobsbawm, never-resigning member of the Communist Party, was made Companion of Honour (to the Queen). Fair enough, for
In London, at the beginning of each November, people wear a red poppy in their lapel, and nowadays this has to be explained to foreigners. On the part of France where the British fought in the First World War, the area between the two front lines was studded with poppies,
Sometimes I am asked: why history? In so many places, history is a sort of primary-school nationalist propaganda, and serious people do something else. One of the best lines in Robert Skidelsky’s life of John Maynard Keynes is a remark made to Lytton Strachey in Florence, when he was writing
Hungary and I go back quite a long way, in fact some fifty years, and I have learned a vast amount from the country. I first came here in 1961, to attend a Hungarian language course in Debrecen. Back then I was taken up with the Habsburg Monarchy and the
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