GUSZTÁV BÁGER is a poet and economist. He is professor emeritus at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Between 1990 and 1992, he was the head of the Economic Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance, and in 1992, he became the head of the International Finance Department of the Ministry of Finance. From 2003, he was the director general of the Research Institute for the State Audit Office, then its scientific adviser. Between 2015 and 2020, he was a member of the Monetary Council of the Central Bank of Hungary. He received the prestigious József Attila literary prize for excellence in 2012.
GERGELY EGEDY is a historian, political scientist, and university professor. He teaches at the newly founded National University of Public Service. He specializes in the history of political thought and British history. His major works include Nagy-Britannia története (A History of Great Britain, 1998, 2011); Konzervativizmus az ezredfordulón (Conservatism at the Turn of the Millennium, 2001); Brit konzervatív gondolkodás és politika (British Conservative Thought and Politics, 2005); Bevezetés a nemzetközi kapcsolatok elméletébe (An Introduction to the Theory of International Relations, 2007, 2011).
FERENC HÖRCHER is a philosopher, intellectual historian, poet, and legal theorist. He is currently head of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the National University of Public Service, Budapest, and senior fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network. His research interests include conservatism and liberalism, the history of early modern political thought, classical Hungarian political thought, and early modern and contemporary philosophy of art. He published a co-edited and co-authored volume, A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe (Bloomsbury, 2019), and his own monograph, A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). His most recent publication, The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, through City-State, to Megalopolis? (Lexington Books, 2021) offers a wide-ranging panorama of urban political culture in Europe.
BORIS KÁLNOKY grew up in Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, and France. His family left Hungary in 1947. He studied politics and history in Hamburg and went on to work at the German daily Die Welt in 1987. In 1995, he became Balkans correspondent for Die Welt, based in Budapest, and moved on in 2004 to become Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. He is the author of Ahnenland (Munich: Droemer Verlag, 2011), a book about what had happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still working for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media organizations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Since September 2020, he has been head of the Media School at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest.
ALEXIS LÉONAS holds an M.Phil from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the Sorbonne (University of Paris-IV). He has written and published extensively on history of religion and the French literature: L’Aube des Traducteurs (Paris, Cerf) 2007, Les petites fleurs de sainte Marguerite de Hongrie (Paris, Cerf), 2013, Muse étrangère. Petite anthologie poétique de l’Europe française (Kiel/Bastia, Solivagus), 2015, Pierre Dubois, De la reconquête de la Terre Sainte… (Paris, Les Belles Lettres), 2019. From 2015 lecturer and from 2019 associate professor at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary.
JÁNOS MARTONYI is a university professor (University of Szeged; ELTE University, Budapest; College of Europe in Bruges and Natolin; Central European University, Budapest), politician, attorney, international arbitrator, and author of numerous books, essays, and articles, primarily in the field of international trade law, competition policy and law, European integration and law, cooperation in Central Europe, global regulations, and international relations. He was commissioner for privatization (1989–1990); state secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations (1990–1991); state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1991– 1994); managing partner at the law firm Martonyi and Kajtár, Baker & McKenzie, Budapest (1994–1998, 2002–2009); head of the Institute for Private International Law and International Trade Law at the University of Szeged (1999–2009); and minister for foreign affairs of Hungary (1998–2002, 2010–2014). Awards: the Commander’s Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Széchenyi Prize, the Hungarian Corvin Chain Award for Merit, the Hungarian American Coalition 2016 Award, the Legion of Honour of France, the National Order of Merit of France, and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun of Japan, as well as British, Austrian, Polish, and Bulgarian state decorations.
ANDRÁS NAGY is a writer and academic, associate professor at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, and senior research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Kőszeg. Besides his interest in literature, philosophy and theatre, he is conducting historical research focusing on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the United Nations. His last book was based on documents that became accessible only recently, and which shed light on previously unknown aspects of the Cold War.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of National Review in New York, where he served as editor-in-chief for ten years. He was a special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organization dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher. Until 2011, he was the executive editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the president of the Danube Institute, Budapest, and an associate editor of Hungarian Review and Hungarian Conservative. His latest collection of essays, The Woke versus the West: Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age, was published in 2020.
KATALIN RÓNA is a journalist and editor. She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. During her career as a journalist, she was a theatre critic and editor of the weekly Film Színház Muzsika, then editor of the cultural column of the daily Magyar Nemzet. For fifteen years she was the head of communications for the National Office for the Protection of Monuments, and of its legal successors, the Office for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Forster Centre. Currently she is working as the architecture, monument protection and performing arts editor of the magazine Országút.
ILDIKÓ SZABÓ is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University and at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies of the National University of Public Service. She defended her PhD thesis in 2017. She worked in the area of tax procedures at the Ministry of Finance for ten years, also representing Hungary as a tax expert at the respective consultations with the European Union. She is currently head of the Legal Department of the Prime Minister’s Office.
NÓRA SZEKÉR is a historian and university professor who studied history at Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Piliscsaba–Budapest), where she earned her PhD in 2009 on the Hungarian resistance of the Second World War. At present, she teaches modern history at the same institution. Her field of research also includes post-war history, the 1956 Revolution and the Kádár era. She is a senior researcher at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian (Communist) State Security. Her publications include two books on the Hungarian Fraternal Community, a clandestine patriotic and anti-totalitarian network of the thirties and forties. She is editor of the secret records of prominent anti-Nazi politicians of the Horthy regime, the memoirs of Domokos Szent-Iványi (1913 and 2016), and the diaries of Ferenc Zsindely (2021).
PETER GYULA TOGHIA was born in 1945 and spent the first eleven years of his life in Hungary. He escaped the communist regime after the Hungarian Revolution was put down by the Soviets in October 1956, then immigrated to the United States, where he lived in Los Angeles until 1966. He married in 1966, and since then he has lived in Orange County, California. He has now retired from general contracting and real estate brokering, but is still an active civil engineer and forensic engineering expert.
ZSOLT VISY is an archaeologist specializing in the military history of the Roman Empire and early Christian archaeology. He obtained his doctoral degree in 1977 from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. In addition to conducting numerous excavations in Hungary and Germany, he was a professor at the University of Pécs from 1984, where he headed the Department of Archeology until 2011. Between 1998 and 2000, he was state secretary at the Ministry of National Heritage in Budapest. Since 2002, he has also been a professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published numerous articles and six books, including The Ripa Pannonica in Hungary (Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003). In 2011, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary