NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of 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, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some 18 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 more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide; Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019 he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).
11 January 2020
"As reliably as the announcement of the first cuckoo in spring, letters appeared in the liberal press after the Tory triumph in the British general election on 12 December 2019 complaining that the electoral system in the UK was dysfunctional and unfair. I think we can assume that the writers of these letters were not supporters of the winning side; they were also unlikely to be supporters of Labour, the principal loser, since that party has shown in the past that it can win big under the present “First Past the Post” (FPTP) system."
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28 June 2019
"In private Norman was kind and generous and prepared to help students who showed promise. His asides entertained many of them: the man in the flesh was less of an activist throwing verbal bricks (many of them well deserved) through fashionable windows and more of an erudite overturner of applecarts. He may have despised the feminists, but Norman, twice married and once divorced, actually loved the company of women, and they could be very fond of him. I know of at least two in Budapest who were, and who collaborated with him on projects. One of them, the writer and publisher, Annabel Barber, tells me she particularly enjoyed his rascally sense of humour."
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20 April 2019
"Quite a lot of White Shift, Eric Kaufmann’s brilliant, lengthy and massively researched book, revolves around the Overton Window, insofar as he charts the increase in resistance to norms laid down by multicultural ideologues as the 'white' majorities of Europe and the Anglosphere react to a perceived threat to their cultural and ethnic dominance. The Kulturkampf that has ensued is analysed with clarity and balance. However his core theme is that migration is a feature of human existence..."
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22 January 2019
"An imperial EU, if it is to function, will necessarily be authoritarian, since there is as yet no demos that would provide the basis for a genuine pan-European democracy. A partial solution is supposedly offered by 'subsidiarity', a notion founded in Catholic doctrine, which accepts that some issues are best resolved at the local level. However this is in conflict with the Eurocratic mindset of accreting power to Brussels wherever and whenever possible – 'more Europe' as Angela Merkel used to urge, though perhaps not entirely sincerely."
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