Jaap Scholten, a Dutch writer and journalist, moved to Hungary in 2003. His book Comrade Baron. A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy is his first work[…]
Venice in the late 1500s is a powerful republic, a ubiquitous commercial and political actor in the Mediterranean despite long wars with the Ottoman Empire. But at home discontent rumbles[…]
In 2009 anti-black racism hit the headlines in China after 20-year-old singer Lou Jing from Shanghai made it to the final of the casting-show Jiayou Oriental Angel. Her parents were[…]
When Journey by Moonlight opens, Mihály and Erzsi are in Venice on the early leg of a honeymoon journey that is to take them through Italy with stops in Ravenna,[…]
Among the many children born in Budapest in 1886 there was one called József Schwarz. He turned out to be a bright lad and although his parents were not particularly[…]
It is well-known that during Spain’s bloody, murderously divisive civil war of 1936-39 tens of thousands of volunteers from across Europe and North America flocked to the Iberian Peninsula to[…]
One day in December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor, then aged 18, boarded a ship near Tower Bridge in London and set off for an adventure of a lifetime, or in[…]
“His frivolity was offensive. I became tired of his old-fashioned wing collars, his narrow yellow ties, and especially his atrocious puns. His determined eccentricity wore me out.” Still, as this[…]
“Man amidst inhumanity” was the motto chosen to mark the centennial anniversary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg last year, in honour of a Swedish citizen whose dedication to rescuing[…]
Some 65 years ago on the outskirts of Bavaria’s Kaufbeuren, a thousand settlers working from a disused munitions factory launched the production of glass and jewellery artefacts, making the new[…]
