Minority Self-Governments in Hungary
By István Riba

Hungary is unique in the region for enacting a law that makes specific provisions for the creation of local, regional and national self-governments for its ethnic minorities. István Riba begins by describing the historical background, the act itself along with its more striking anomalies and finishes with the financial funding for these governments, concentrating on the Roma, the largest of all minorities in the country.

Local Minority Self Governance and Hungary's Roma
By Kai Schafft

To assess the workings of the Minorities Law of 1993, sociologists from Cornell University and Gödöllő University collaborated on a national survey to find out how the new law affected the Roma. The author, based at Cornell, first describes the assimilationist policies of the socialist era, sums up the survey's results and draws some conclusions for the future.

The Photographer György Klösz
By László Lugosi László

The author, himself a professional photographer, here describes the career and life of the pre-eminent nineteenth-century photographer. After outlining the techniques available when Klösz started out, he describes how he took photography out of the studio to capture the wave of public building that saw Budapest rapidly expand into a metropolis after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the photographs for which he is best known. He traces his expanding interests, including photolithography and printing as such, concluding with a description of his series on the Millenium Exhibition of 1896, and a series on the country houses and chateaux of the aristocracy.

A City in Photographs
By Pál Ritoók

Pál Ritoók reviews a new book by Károly Kincses, who set up the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Kecskemét and P. Tibor Sándor, the director of the Budapest Collection of the city's Municipal Library. The book covers photographs by no less than 56 photographers that are significant both for the history of photography and for the history of the city itself.

Budapest Trio
By Károly Kincses - P. Tibor Sándor

These are extracts from their recently published book, reviewed in this issue by Pál Ritoók, which deal with photographs by Robert Capa, Zoltán Berekméri, and Kálmán Szöllösy.

Border Violations
By Erzsébet Bori

Our regular film critic here provides a round-up of the more interesting short features made recently by Hungarian directors, a genre with major traditions in this country and which directors have now returned to, in part out of economic necessity. She especially praises Júlia Szederkény's Bóbita, based on the marvellous poems written for children by Sándor Weörös, one of Hungary's greatest poets.

And the Birds Fly Away
By László Ferenczi

Taking his title from one of its most important poems (by Lajos Kassák), László Ferenczi, who teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Miskolc, here reviews an anthology of Hungarian avant-garde literature. He traces the history of the individuals and small magazines that associated themselves with it and finds much to praise in the selection on offer.

Idea Aeroplanes and Oberdada
Júlia Szabó

A historian of art, Júlia Szabó here reviews two important new scholarly books on the avant-garde of the first half of this century, one of them an anthology, and the other concentrating on its Central European nexus. She provides a concise summary of the centres and the individuals involved.

The Economics of Culture and the Culture of Economics
By Tamás Bácskai

Professor of Economics at the Budapest University of Economics and a former managing director of the Central Bank, the author turns an economist's eye onto the funding and role of the arts in a newly emerged free market economy. Beginning with the official policy towards the arts in the last years of the socialist era, he applies some of the tools of an economist to assess the relationship between the arts and the market.

"The Task of Cultural Policy is to Create Markets"
By Gergely Prőhle

Gergely Pröhle is Under-Secretary for State at the Ministry for Cultural Heritage. We print here part of his speech delivered at a conference organized earlier this year on the consequences for cultural policy of Hungary's accession to the European Union. In it he stresses the diminished but still important role the state has to play in the cultural field.

A Proud Hungarian
By Tibor Scitovsky

The author was educated at Cambridge and the LSE before making a considerable reputation as an economist at Stanford University in Calafornia. However neither his career nor his family background are typical of the average academic, as his recently published autobiography reveals. This, the first of two excerpts, outlines his family history, childhood summers on the family estate, the ennui of the service gentry class. He fondly describes his father, a member of the Hungarian delegation to Trianon and later a Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of a bank, and especially their magnificent town house in Budapest, now the residence of the British Ambassador.

Life and Times
By András Nagy

A review of the Hungarian edition of Tibor Scitovsky's autobiography, as well as an account of his life and career.

The Witnesses of Summer
By Magda Szabó

Now in her eighties, the novelist and short story writer turns to a favoured subject, the haute bourgeoisie and gentry in the first quarter of the century.

Poems
By László Lator

These three poems by the septuaguarian poet and translator reflect on the onset of age and death. In David Hill's translation.

Invented Peasant Music
By Paul Griffiths

"A sumptuous facsimile edition" of the first work of Bartók's to be commissioned by an institution (the Municipal Council of Budapest) is how The New York Times's music critic describes this edition of the composer's Dance Suite for Orchestra.

The Yellow House of Eszterháza
By George Szirtes

This is the first of a sequence devoted to the "Hungarian Versailles", the Esterházy Palace, by the Anglo-Hungarian poet.