ANTHONY DANIELS (London, 1949) is a writer and retired psychiatrist who lived several years in Africa. Daniels has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education, and medicine – often drawing on his experiences as a doctor and psychiatrist in Africa and the United Kingdom. He is the author of several books, notably Life at the Bottom and Romancing Opiates. Dr Daniels writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple.

GÁSPÁR GRÓH (Budapest, 1953), literary historian and critic, has been the Editor-in-Chief of Magyar Szemle since 2017. He was editor of the weekly Magyar Napló in 1988–90, and of Heti Magyarország (1991–94). In 2012–2017 he was Head of the Office of the Hungarian President. He received the President’s Order of Merit in 2005. He has published several collections of essays on 20th century Hungarian literature. His works include Egymásért vagyunk (2000) [We are for one another], Nézni a láthatatlant (2005) [Contemplating the invisible], A következmények országa (2011) [The land of consequences], Szemben a felejtéssel, 2017 [Facing oblivion].

NORBERT HAKLIK (Ózd, 1976), writer and critic, studied Hungarian and English literature and linguistics in Budapest. He is the author of two short story compilations (A Mennybemeneteli Iroda [Salvation agency], 1998, 2013; Világvége Gömörlúcon [The world’s end in Gömörlúc], 2001), a novel (Big Székely Só [Big Szekler show], 2006), and several translations from English into Hungarian. His latest work Egy Duna-regény anatómiája (The anatomy of a Danube-novel), 2013 is a set of literary essays that entirely focuses on Thomas Kabdebo’s novel trilogy Danubius Danubia, just like the work published in the present issue of Hungarian Review. Haklik currently lives in Brno (the Czech Republic), with his wife and daughter.

VÁCLAV KLAUS (Prague, 1941) Czech economist and politician who served as Prime Minister and President of the Czech Republic. He graduated from the University of Economics in Prague. He was a research worker at the Institute of Economics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1968 when he completed his PhD in economics. At the beginning of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Klaus entered politics and served as Minister of Finance (1989–92) and became involved in the Civil Forum Movement – an organisation he ultimately chaired in 1990. After the “Velvet Divorce” – the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia into the independent countries of Slovakia and the Czech Republic – in 1992–93, Klaus became Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. He was elected the second President of the Czech Republic in 2003. Václav Klaus has received sixteen honorary doctorates in nine countries; nineteen international awards and has published over twenty books.

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1970–1989. He received research and teaching fellowships from the British Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, CIES and The German Marshall Fund of the US. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara (1984–85) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004–2009) and read his poetry in English widely in the US. In 1987, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In 1990–94, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. In 2000–2005 he was an Advisor to President Ferenc Mádl. In 2012, he received Hungary’s Middle Cross with the Star and in 2005 the President’s Medal of Honour for his public and literary achievements. With Magyar Szemle, he received a Prima Prize in 2003. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature.

ANDRÁS LÁNCZI (Budapest, 1956) is a political philosopher. He has been the Director of the Institute of Political Science and Philosophy at Corvinus University, Budapest since 2002. He graduated in English and History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1981. From the late 1980s until 1991, he was Editor of the philosophy journal Világosság (Light/ Clarity). From 1997 on, he made several research and lecture tours in the US. Since 2007, he is Chairman of the Center for European Renewal, an international organization of leading intellectuals working on the revival of conservative political thought. In 2010-16, he was Chairman of Századvég Foundation, the principal think-tank of the Fidesz Party. In 2016, he was elected Provost of Corvinus University. Among his books published in Hungarian are On Political Knowledge, Fate-Legacy, Tradition and Modernity in Leo Strauss’s Political Philosophy, Democracy and Political Science, Political Philosophy of the 20th Century.

DAVID MARTIN JONES is a political scientist, writer and commentator. Dr Jones is an Honorary Reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland and Visiting Professor and Teaching Fellow in War Studies at King’s College, University of London. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, and has taught at the Open University, National University of Singapore, and the University of Tasmania. His works include Political Development in Pacific Asia (1997), The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (2001), with N. Khoo and M. L. R. Smith The Rise of China and Asia Pacific Security (Edward Elgar 2013) and with M. L. R. Smith Sacred Violence Political Religion in a Secular Age (Macmillan 2014) and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counter-Insurgency (Columbia 2015). He is a frequent contributor to the periodicals, such as The Spectator, The Sunday Times, London and The Australian.

GORDON McKECHNIE (Detroit, 1951) was educated at the International School of Geneva and at the University of Oxford. After a career in banking (working in the then emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe from 1989), he became a Partner of Deloitte and subsequently worked for the UK Treasury. Among his current positions, he is Chairman of the OECD’s Infrastructure and PPP Network and member of the International Committee of Tearfund.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN (Liverpool, 1942) 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 organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Lady Thatcher. His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (on Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher), was published in Hungarian, too, in 2010. 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.

NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. Agraduateof New College, Oxford, he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as Reader in English at the University of Pisa before returning to the UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the “system change” of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for 20 years. His recent books are Worth the Detour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide; Vienna: A Cultural History Signet (Oxford University Press; Italian edition: Vienna: Ritratto di unacitta, Odoya, Bologna), and A New Devil’s Dictionary: Lexicon for Contrarians.

MÁRIA PROKOPP (Budapest, 1939), has been Professor of Art History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest since 1995. Her main field of research is European art of the 14th and 15th centuries. She published books on Italian masters like Giotto, Sassetta and Lorenzetti, and on the late Gothic art of Hungary. Almost for forty years, she has conducted research on the mural paintings of the late 15th century Esztergom palace of Archbishop János Vitéz and their Italian Renaissance connections. In 2000 she received a major grant to explore and restore the frescoes of the Virtues with the collaboration of restoration expert Zsuzsanna Wierdl, using the most up to date technology. The present essay, based on their joint multilingual book establishing the authorship of Botticelli, is a summary of that process. She is a holder of the Officer’s Rank of the Hungarian Order of Merit (2010).

GERGELY SZILVAY (1983) journalist, editor. He received his degree in History and Communication from Pázmány Péter Catholic University and is currently working towards his PhD in political theory. As a journalist, he has been working for the daily Magyar Nemzet, the online Catholic journal Magyar Kurír, and the Inforádió. Currently, he is an associate editor for Mandiner. Between 2016–2017, he was a beneficiary of the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor scholarship in New York.

LAJOS VÉKÁS (Kolozsvár, 1939) professor emeritus of law, is the author of nineteen books in Hungarian, English and German on private law and private international law. He taught these subjects at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest (1963–2009), was Rector of this University (1990–1993) and founding Rector of the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study (1992–1997). He was a visiting professor at the University Heidelberg (1986/87). Since 2014 he is Vice-President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.