12 March 2020
Our Authors
JAMES ALLAN holds the oldest named chair at The University of Queensland. Before arriving in Australia in 2005, he spent 11 years teaching law in New Zealand at the University of Otago, and before that lectured in law in Hong Kong. He is a native-born Canadian who practised law in a large Toronto law firm and at the Bar in London before shifting to teaching law. He has published widely in the areas of legal philosophy and constitutional law, including in all the top English language legal philosophy journals in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, much the same being true of constitutional law journals as well. Professor Allan also writes widely for newspapers including The Spectator Australia, Quadrant and The Australian. His latest book Democracy in Decline was published in 2014.
CSENGE E. ARADI (Baja, 1989): PhD, graduated from the University of Szeged in 2018. She is a full-time instructor at the Department of English Language Teacher Education and Applied Linguistics (ELTEAL, Institute of English and American Studies, SZTE). Specialized in cultural and applied linguistics, her main areas of research include metaphor systems in literary discourse and the cognitive aspects of second language reading. Her first book, entitled Diskurzusok Istenről és emberről (Ráció kiadó) was published in 2019.
JEREMY BLACK is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He studied at Queens’ College Cambridge, St John’s College Oxford, and Merton College Oxford before joining the University of Durham as a lecturer in 1980. There he gained his PhD and ultimately his professorship in 1994. He joined Exeter University as Established Chair in History in 1996. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He was editor of Archives, journal of the British Records Association, from 1989 to 2005. His main area of research focuses on British and continental European history, with particular interest in international relations, military history, the press and historical atlases. He is the author of more than 100 books. His key publications include British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1744–57 Mid-Century Crisis (Routledge, 2015), The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World (2015), A History of Diplomacy (2010), and Crisis of Empire (2010).
ROBERTO DE MATTEI (Rome, 1948) is an Italian historian, President of the Lepanto Foundation. He has taught Modern History at the University of Rome – La Sapienza, University of Cassino, and European University of Rome. He was Vice President of the National Research Council, the largest Italian scientific organization. He was also adviser for international affairs to the Italian Government. He is the editor of the monthly magazine Radici Cristiane and the news agency Corrispondenza Romana, which is also available in French and Spanish. Additionally, he is a regular contributor to the American magazine The Remnant. He is the author of 20 historical and political books, including the best-selling book, The Second Vatican Council: A Story Never Written, translated into eight languages. He is married and a father of five children.
FRANCESCO GIUBILEI (Cesane, 1992) is an author, publisher, and professor based in Italy. He is the President of the leading Italian conservative foundation Fondazione Tatarella, a writer for the newspapers Il Giornale and Il Messaggero, and a professor at the University G. Fortunato Benevento. Giubilei was recently included in Forbes’s list of 100 most influential youths in Italy under 30. He is the author of six books, The History of European Conservative Thought is his latest.
GYÖRGY GÖMÖRI (Budapest, 1934) has been living in England since November 1956. After studies in Oxford, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley), and then did research at Harvard. From 1969 to 2001 he taught at the University of Cambridge. He published many books on Polish and Hungarian literature; also numerous books of poetry in Hungarian and several in English. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Kraków). He was awarded the Janus Pannonius Prize for Translation in 2014. His recent publications include Steep Path, an anthology of modern Hungarian poetry translated with Clive Wilmer (Corvina, 2018) and Magyar „apostol” Angliában. Tanulmányok és versek Békássyról (Savaria, 2020).
GÉZA JESZENSZKY (Budapest, 1941). Historian, D.Phil. (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest). Was schoolteacher and librarian; from 1976 to 2011 taught modern history at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. Was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1984–1986. Also taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Pacific Lutheran University at Tacoma, WA; College of Europe, Warsaw, Poland; Babes-Bolyai University at Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He was Foreign Minister of Hungary in the first non-Communist government (1990–1994), Ambassador to the United States of America in 1998–2002, and to Norway and Iceland in 2011–2014. He is the author of a large number of scholarly publications and political writings, including Lost Prestige. The Changing Image of Hungary in Britain, 1894–1918 (Budapest, 1986, 1994, 2020 in Hungarian, coming out in English in 2020); Post-Communist Europe and Its National/Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2005, 2009), July 1944. Deportation of the Jews of Budapest Foiled. (Ed.) (Reno, NV: Helena History Press LLC, 2018.) His book on Hungary’s relations to its neighbours in the years of the regime change (Kísérlet a trianoni trauma orvoslására. Magyarország szomszédsági politikája a rendszerváltozás éveiben) came out in 2016. He is co-author of a book on the history of skiing in the Carpathian Basin (2016). He is an editorial adviser for Hungarian Review.
BORIS KÁLNOKY was born in 1961 in Munich and grew up in Germany, the US, Holland 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 (Droemer Verlag, Munich, 2011), a book about what happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942) Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review is the author of 16 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– 1985) 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 1990–1994, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. In 1992–1996 he was the Vice President of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created the Duna Television, a cultural satellite channel. In 2000–2005 he was an Adviser 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. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. In 2016 he received the Janus Pannonius Prize for poetry translation.
MIHÁLY LUDMANN (Debrecen, 1959) painter, art historian, teacher. He studied philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University and graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1989. Since then he has been teaching art history and drawing. His paintings have been displayed in numerous exhibitions from the 1980s. His most notable books are A magyar építészet mesterei I. [Masters of Hungarian Architecture I.] (2014), A magyar szobrászat mesterei [Masters of Hungarian Sculpture] (2015), Művészek a háborúban 1914–1918 [Artists in the War 1914–1918] (2015), A magyar építészet mesterei II. [Masters of Hungarian Architecture II. ] (2017), A Lechner összes [Lechner Collected Works] (2017). He publishes widely on art exhibitions in the online magazine, pestbuda.hu.
DANIEL J. MAHONEY holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he has taught since 1986. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy Against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends (2011); The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (2014); and The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (2018). He is presently working on a book called The Statesman as Thinker: Nine Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, to be published by Encounter Books.
ZSOLT NÉMETH (Budapest, 1963) is a founding member of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Party), and Member of Parliament since 1990. He studied political science at the Oxford University St Anthony’s College as a visiting student in 1988–1989. He holds an MA in Economics and Sociology from Karl Marx (Corvinus) University of Economic Sciences at Budapest. Since 2014 he has been Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Head of the Hungarian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe. Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee between 2002 and 2010; Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 1998–2002 and again in 2010–2014. In 2004, he was Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. One of the main sponsors of the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (1993), granting individual and collective rights and the right to self-government for ethnic and national minorities living in Hungary, as well as of the Act allowing non-resident Hungarians to apply for Hungarian citizenship if they are of Hungarian origin and speak the language (2010). He is also a founder of the Pro Minoritate Foundation; Honorary Chief Superintendent of the Calvinist Congregation of Transylvania; and Member of the Knight’s Order of the Johannites.
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.
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a writer, teacher, and editor from England, who has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the US. He is the author of Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968 (Anthem Press, January 2020).
ERIK SASS is a freelance writer and editor holding a BA in history from Duke University and an MA in journalism from New York University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Economic Standard. Since 2011 he has written a blog covering the causes of the First World War, as well as the events of the war itself, to commemorate the centennial of the conflict. He is also the author of The Mental Floss History of the United States and co-author of The Mental Floss History of the World.