Category: Arts and Letters

A Journey in Eastern Estonia Outside the front door, a crowd of rowdy transvestites were passing by. They had bottles of beer in their hands. One of them vomited against the wall. Another told us they were from London, English lads visiting Tallinn for a stag party. We had not

The Wind Has Entered My Room A szél jött be szobámba The wind has entered my room, and it talks to me.From the wind the answer comes into my labyrinth,the rustle of the leaves? The poet of old?To whom the wind talked once, and now he speaks To me, that

Words quarrel, ideas clash, truths hide, theories mislead, deadlines have seized strategic chokepoints threatening paralysis, supplies of semicolons have failed to arrive on time, metaphors and similes are suspected of being enemy agents, irony and litotes have changed the road signs sending the unwary in the wrong directions, and all

The Art of Márton Barabás in the Budapest Hall of Art One of the most characteristic abstract motifs of Márton Barabás’s (1952) stylistically and thematically diverse body of work is music, alongside an investigation of such musical concepts as repetition, and the relationship of the part to the whole. Another

You are holding in your hand one of the strangest, most vivid and glamorous of verse tales, the story of a peasant boy found among corn and therefore named Johnny Grain-o’-Corn, who from early childhood has pledged his heart to an orphan girl, the beautiful Iluska (called Nelly [or Nell

There is no acceptable excuse for emigration after takingadvantage of the treasures of one’s homeland; leaving herfor good is nothing but a betrayal. István Széchenyi I came to Hungary in September to begin my Fulbright grant,

A Review of The Innocence of Pontius Pilate. How the Roman Trial ofJesus Shaped History by David Lloyd Dusenbury (London: Hurst &Co., 2021) The title is compelling. TheInnocence of Pontius Pilate brings back the sensation one always has while reading the Gospel. The spell of the narrative is such that

Anti-communism in Waugh’s Sword of Honour Ever since Tolstoy’s magisterial presentation of the battlefields in War and Peace, writers have been keen to take on the challenge of transforming the ordinarily horrific experience of war into a narrative work of scope and grandeur. The British novelist Evelyn Waugh (Arthur Evelyn

Outside or Inside? In the autumn of 2021, as a guest on the panel discussion on the topic ‘How to plan liveable cities for the future?’, the Japanese designer of the House of Music Hungary in City Park, Budapest, put it like this: The House of Music Hungary is being

Howard Hunter’s rejoinder to the János Kubassek articleon Christianity and religions in Indonesia Dear Editors, I read with great pleasure the charming essay by János Kubassek about the School of St Stephen and Fr Tamás Krump on the Indonesian Island of Flores. My wife and I lived in Singapore for