On my way to Vienna one fine day in 1956 I decided to pop in to see my sister who was living in Paris at the time. She liked the idea. We had not seen each-other for quite a...
The Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Francis Joseph I, was obliged by his coronation oath, taken in 1867, to spend regular periods of time in Hungary. To this end, the Hungarian...
I have always wanted to visit the place where my parents had spent their honeymoon: Capri. I never got there before now. So I took a deep breath while visiting Budapest and...
Allow me to entertain you with a true story that you will find hard to believe. The lady who came into our nursery on a rainy autumn afternoon in 1941 was dressed in gray and her...
In the embrace of what I call the feverish agony of my bout with this twenty-first century plague I marveled about how an eighteenth century English poet could foresee and reflect...
Spying is about secrets and secrets are power … power over your fellow man. You can make him do just about anything – right or wrong, good or bad – when you know...
A month ago I told you a story about an island in the middle of the Danube river. Allow me to tell you another. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the big bad guy in...
During the last decade Budapest has gradually evolved into an extraordinarily attractive city, thanks to the many millions of Euros that the European Union has poured into the...
Three years of nail-biting it took me before I dared go back to Budapest again. I just did not trust the Hungarian authorities’ way of reporting on the Covid threat in their...
