Britannia vonzásában by Frank Tibor (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 561 political ecologists and of many others. Those environmental historians who think along such lines need to get out more. They certainly need to read more widely. That said, this is an excellent volume which has made an important contribution to our understanding of Russia’s past. Although there are many individual points with which one might disagree, the book is scholarly, generally well balanced and rich in insight. It is a valuable addition to the literature. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Denis J. B. Shaw University of Birmingham Frank, Tibor. Britannia vonzásában. Gondolat Kiadó, Budapest, 2018. 306 pp. Illustrations. Appendix. Index. Ft4000. The ‘British’ half of a pair of handsomely produced volumes bearing the overall title ‘Studies in British and American History’, this carefully chosen and well illustrated selection of twenty papers devoted mainly to BritishHungarian links since the early nineteenth century confirms Tibor Frank as the leading student of historical and cultural relations between his homeland and the Anglo-Saxon world. It usefully supplements his monographs on G. G. Zerffi and the British perception of the Habsburg monarchy (New York, 2000 and 2005, respectively, and both also translated into Japanese), as well as his series of Hungarian textbooks on British history, co-authored with Tamás Magyarics. While all these studies have been published before, either in English or in Hungarian (indeed, some in both languages), they have appeared in a wide range of generally hard-to-access sources, and to a number of them the author has now unobtrusively added new material. The collection can therefore be treated as an original publication that will be essential reading for all those interested in this area. Half of the papers in this volume are gathered under the umbrella heading ‘Englishmen and Hungarians’ and range in time from the mid-nineteenth century (a finely documented debunking of the myth that the revolutionary leaderLajosKossuthlearnthisextraordinaryEnglishfromreadingShakespeare while he was in prison) to the 1980s (an entirely typical, forthright extract from A. J. P. Taylor’s memoir, A Personal History). In between Frank covers a number of important and fascinating themes. One is the revelatory career of János Reseta, a liberal Hungarian censor before the 1848–49 Revolution, which he finds has perhaps unexpected parallels with the practice of censorship in the later Kádár period; another is one of his most enjoyable early papers, on the trip made to Transylvania by Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 562 in 1866. While the British attitude to the Ausgleich of 1867 is examined in two other studies in this section, a further paper on this topic is included under the second broad heading ‘Hungarian Politics and the Anglo-Saxon World’, which also contains a detailed account of the career of the diplomat Antal UlleinReviczky , as well as the shortest but in some ways most surprising article here, about how the ruthless prime minister István Tisza, determined to improve Hungarian parliamentary discipline in the 1910s, commissioned a study of British parliamentary procedures and processes from the well-regarded jurist Árpád Ferenczy. This tome weighs in at 541 pages and reveals as much about Tisza’s thinking as about its topic, to which it is a little-known but unique Hungarian contribution. The final clutch of six papers comprises Frank’s studies on the legendary interwar journal published in Budapest, the Hungarian Quarterly, and its outstandingly able and multilingual, though ‘mannered, arrogant, snobbish, homosexual, and Catholic convert’ (p. 214) editor, József Balogh, who began as, and indeed remained, a noted classicist (he translated the Confessions of St Augustine into Hungarian, for instance). It is here that the major point made in the introduction, which bears the subtitle, ‘The History of a Yearning?’, comes most clearly into focus. These explorations of the Hungarian Quarterly’s history spectacularly illustrate one of the author’s lifelong concerns, namely the elaboration of the anglophile (‘Anglo-Saxon’) political orientation in Hungary, especially between the two World Wars, which for obvious geopolitical, economic and linguistic reasons has always been overshadowed by its much better documented — and hence better researched — links with Germany. Operating as the semi-official...