Category: VOLUME IV, No. 6

FAIRY TALES WE TELL OURSELVES

Once Hungary kindly arranged a peaceful end to the Cold War, the politics of all Western countries, including Japan and including the newly Western countries of the former “Eastern Europe”, have been in disarray. That is because during the long conflict the political divisions in almost all nations were provoked and arranged

PRESIDENT KLAUS’ EUROPEAN MANIFESTO

The publication of the manifesto in September by the former Czech president, Václav Klaus, and signed by various European politicians and academics, which criticised an article by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German Green Member of the European Parliament, was not the first occasion the two men have crossed swords. In December 2008, a famously bad-tempered exchange took place between them

AMERICA, ENGLAND, EUROPE – WHY DO WE DIFFER?

INTRODUCTION For much of the twentieth century, it was widely accepted in liberal circles that America is the blueprint for the future of other countries. England was treated as a similar blueprint in the nineteenth century. But the Anglosphere cannot be a blueprint for other, very different countries. Even Continental

DOMOKOS SZENT-IVÁNYI AND HIS BOOK – PART I

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himselfaccording to the outcome, he would never begin.Even though the result may gladden the wholeworld, that cannot help the hero; for he knows theresult only when the whole thing is over, and that isnot how he became a hero, but by

THE THREE LIVES OF A HUNGARIAN GENERAL – HE RECEIVED HIS HIGHEST HONOURS FROM MYSTIC INDIA

Zoltán Álgya-Pap was the only Hungarian general in the Second World War who received the coveted gold medal for extraordinary courage in face of enemy fire. Like most of the country’s military by 1944, his troops were dispirited, sick of the war and the Germans who on 19 March that year not only occupied their nominal ally Hungary but in fact took control of

RADIO TIMES: NOTES AND POEMS – PART III

A LIFE SPENT ON SHORT WAVE You have to be totally devoid of common sense not to believe in mystery. Mystery is there every step we take, literally under our noses. This is something every lathe operator who works with metal, every joiner who works with wood, every sculptor who

FORCED MARCH AND POEMS FROM A MUDDY NOTEBOOK

AB: In the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, the official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, there is no mention of the name of Miklós Radnóti. The great Hungarian poet, who was born in Budapest into a Jewish family, later converted to Catholicism, but that didn’t save him from

POEMS FROM CAMP NOTEBOOK

Look – night is falling and dusk is absorbing the wild oak fence, edged with barbed wire, the hut’s so floating. A slow stare lets the frame of our bondage go and the wire’s tightness is just in the mind, just in the mind. Look, my love – see how