Category: VOLUME VII, No. 4

THE TWO EUROPES

Experience shows that the following is an oft-recurring situation in diplomacy: a highly debated question is at stake, the two parties facing each other are both experienced and intelligent, their approach is unquestionable; their respective positions, however, cannot be reconciled, despite the fact that they understand the common language –

IRON WILL IN POLITICS: MARGARET THATCHER

Hungary’s leading conservative think tank, Századvég Foundation has jointly organised with Budapest-based Danube Institute and Hungarian Review a conference on Margaret Thatcher on 5 May 2016. The event was the second of a series entitled A Europe of Values. In this issue we are publishing contributions by three former British

IRON WILL IN DIPLOMACY – THATCHER AND HUNGARY 1979–1984

INTRODUCTION The theme of the conference is Thatcherite “principles of governance” – glossed as moral conviction, an iron will. Certainly she possessed both qualities – I can testify to that having spent some four years in her office. John O’Sullivan knew her better still. She was a rather motherly person,

THE THATCHER LEGACY

Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013. She is still close to us. Historical judgements about her are still likely to be controversial. But it is already clear that Margaret Thatcher has left a legacy. That is not as normal, let alone as inevitable, as you might suppose. Very few prime

WAY BEYOND THE TAXI BLOCKADE

NSZ: Contemporaneous debates in Parliament and various memoirs make it clear that the gas price hike which triggered the taxi blockade in October 1990 was a contested issue within the government itself. What do you recall about the controversy as Minister of Industry and Trade back then? PÁB: To understand

LETTERS FROM TURKEY – TRANSLATIONS BY BERNARD ADAMS

Letters from Turkey, generally considered the best Hungarian prose work of the eighteenth century, was written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rákóczi II, last prince of independent Transylvania. After the unsuccessful War of Independence (1703–11), in which he had endeavoured to liberate Hungary

ON THE DAYS OF THE EXILED PRINCE RÁKÓCZI – LAJOS HOPP ON KELEMEN MIKES

The author of this collection of studies on Kelemen Mikes is Lajos Hopp (1927–1996), renowned literary historian, who dedicated his life to the eighteenth-century Hungarian writer who not only renewed epistolary fiction but also developed it into real art. Research into Mikes has been carried out since the first publication

NO ORDINARY GIRL – AN INTRODUCTION TO PANNI PALÁSTI’S BUDAPEST GIRL

Panni Palásti’s Budapest Girl (Maitai River Press, New Zealand, 2015, 327 pages) is subtitled “An Immigrant Confronts the Past”, and while the title tells where this girl migrated from, she maintains that all emigrants’ views of the past, considered at eighty, will have much in common, whatever their country of

ORPHIC ONTOLOGIES

For Matthew Eshleman Are you, Muse, the spume off Laussel, archaicdust dimpled & savoury that I nourish to steel myselfagainstthe Selfhood that lays claim to all rapture?Is your fertility still based in the blood-filled bison hornLaussel grasps in her right hand raised slightly below herhead? Might the egg-shaped relief of