Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Memoir of Hungary, 1944-48 > Status Update

"...the man in the middle - even the individual of the Aristotelian 'mean' - always remains a left-winger to the right wingers and a suspected right winger to left wingers.

"It is not possible to debate with fanatics if? on top of it all, they are stupid."

The Communists sold the books of successful writers they disapproved of in the West for hard currency. Thus ensuring the those writers international reputations?

" I began to search the works of the "second set" of Hungarian writers for what I wanted to take with me, because I knew I would never again find any trace of them abroad."

"That was the last time I saw Police. And that was the last time I saw Krudy's handwriting."

"...most of [Krudy's] readers did not have the faintest notion of what surrealism was, and in all probability he didn't either."

"The Communists wanted something more and different: they demanded that their victims remain alive and celebrate the system that destroys human sensibility and self-esteem in its victims."

"Perhaps never, in any danger zone, was the Hungarian intelligentsia so deliberately cohesive as in these months, in the early stages of the communist takeover."

The Inca empire?

"Fortunate are the peoples who can realise social development without revolution. Fortunate are the Scandinavians, the Dutch..." - ?