A new survey of Hungarian history from the earliest times to the present in a world language is always welcome. It is even more heartening when the work is not a translation, but written in living French, for a foreign readership. It is an unfortunate rule that works by Hungarian authors for a Hungarian readership fail when brought out in foreign languages.
It is also welcome that the book is the work of one author. Of course, an author can be fully conversant only with the history of one or two periods, having, for the rest, to write at second and third hand. There is a sense in which it seems preferable that a number of specialists should undertake the writing of a summary work, and many such works have appeared in the past. However, these did not provide evidence of the advantages of collectivity, and it seems that even the highest competence is incapable of making up for that lack of overall coherence which always appears when a number of different authors cooperate.
Miklós Molnár is a specialist in contemporary history. He was active in the reform movement that preceded the 1956 Re volu tion. Since then he has lived in Switzerland, where, until his retirement, he was a professor at the University of Lausanne. He is an acknowledged 20th-century historian, and thus one would expect that this century would receive more space in his book than any other period. Yet this is not so: the balance within the book is almost perfect. Almost the first quarter is devoted to the Medieval period (to 1526), the second to the Early Modern Age (1526-1849), the third to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (to 1918) and the last to the 20th century. The treatment extends up to our own time, since the final pages deal with the first two years of the present Horn government. The work is complemented by a brief chronological survey, a two-page bibliography and an index of names.
The treatment is strictly chronological. The backbone consists of a running presentation of political history. However, there are constant and substantial digressions, illustrated as much as possible by data on social and economic conditions, and on the most important events in the development of culture. In all this the author is concise and informative. There are brilliant miniature portraits of many characters in Hungarian history, politicians as much as of artists. Sometimes similes assist the concision of style, (e.g., Baron József Eötvös as a political thinker is "the Hungarian Tocqueville"). The chapters presenting the social problems of the 19th and 20th centuries are particularly good.

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