There is a long list of gloomy quotations that writers on national and international politics keep handy for those occasions when nations and empires are suffering from sharp systemic upheavals. My own favourite is a line from the play, Juno and the Paycock, which Irish playwright Sean O’Casey puts into the mouth of an amiable Dublin wastrel, “Captain Jack” Boyle, in
Out of despair, insight. A comment from a despairing American friend of mine suddenly helped me to understand Donald Trump and his context. “If Thomas Jefferson had foreseen Donald Trump”, he said, “he would have told his fellow revolutionaries that they must stop fighting immediately and make peace terms with
Pope Francis is widely acclaimed today, less for his Catholic wisdom than for the fact that he is perceived by secular (and some religious) opinion as some kind of “progressive”. Whether this will lead many to return to the Catholic Church or reconsider “the truth about man” that it proffers is highly doubtful. There is an element of the bien-pensant in Francis’s papacy,
Simon Winder, Danubia: a Personal History of Habsburg Europe, Picador, 2013* This book, though not without virtues, illustrates the perils of popular history. The book is about the Habsburg past, yet far too often Winder has no convincing grasp of what he is dealing with. It is written in a light, jokey style which sometimes works, sometimes jars. Musil gets a mention, but
When the United Kingdom voted on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union, most people focused on immigration as the root cause. Some said it was xenophobia or even racism. And certainly immigration, xenophobia and racism were major issues in the referendum. But the ultimate cause of the Brexit vote was not immigration. It was economics. Around 3.2 million
This is an edited version of the speech presented on 21 April 2016 at Corvinus University as part of the conference organised by Ottó Hieronymi of Webster University, Geneva, and Péter Ákos Bod of Corvinus University, Budapest, under the title “Hungary, Central Eastern Europe and the Future of the Western
AN INTRODUCTORY REMARK Let me start by saying that dissidents were one of the best products of Communism. Probably the best. At one point, Václav Havel said: “A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: a spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’.” The living conditions of this spectre were tough. It
For a day at least, Vienna was honouring, rather than merely profiting from, the source of its lustre, as the casket of Otto von Habsburg was borne from Stephansdom to the Kapuzinerkirche. Otto, who died at his Bavarian home on 4 July 2011, had been the last living link with
The history of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary begins with a sainted king and ends with a blessed king. These two facts map out the height from which we can look at Europe, Central Europe and Hungary – and also at our own lives: as Christians and as Hungarians. There
There is an acute sense of the fragmentation of patriarchy in the fin de siècle fictions of Kafka, and the accompanying sense of trauma in his protagonists. If Metamorphosis may be counted as fantasy literature, then it seems that Kafka had to leave the world of the real and enter the fictional
HUNGARIAN REVIEW is
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