Hungary: A Short History

I liked the concision - a lot in a few pages. Not sure it covers all aspects of every eventful period adequately, eg the 1956 uprising or the fall of the Wall; if you've studied these separately you'll be looking for something new and revealing. One hopes it will be useful to undergraduate students studying Eastern European history but not Hungary as a main subject, as it comes from an eminent historian who wrote in a very engaging style, informative throughout.

I am Hungarian and I love history. I was looking forward to reading this book and getting my English husband and grown-up children to read it and understand a bit of my country's history. The book is written in an irritatingly rambling style. The aim is I guess is to put Hungarian history in the wider context. It does not succeed. It keeps on going off target, uses convoluted sentences filled with irrelevant details and ramblings. I am now third of the way through it and getting more annoyed by the minute. There are morsels of interest but the chatty style and the diversions do really grate. Edward Lucas said of the book that "the insights outweigh the muddle but not by much". I am not even sure of that at this point.

If you want an accurate and objective up to date history, don't buy this. An apologist for the Orban régime, the late Norman Stone does little to justify his reputation and factual inaccuracies indicate a lack of rigour in preparing the text.

Well written

This book does what it says on the cover and presents a short history of Hungary in nine chapters from the early 19th century up to the present. Norman Stone is an idiosyncratic historian formerly based at a university in Turkey and his books are always interesting even if his views are not necessarily in accord with those of other historians. This volume is the latest in a series of Short Histories by Stone (Word War Two and Turkey being the others) and anyone with an interest in Hungarian history will want to know how he sees its development in this period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the fall of Communism and beyond. Stone has a racy style and this is certainly not a modern text book approach to relating history where movements and trends tend to be more prominent than the stories of individuals. Certainly this author tends towards the great man approach although he does not ignore historical changes though seems happier talking about individuals and their biographical backgrounds than in presenting facts and figures although there are plenty of those when required. Stone does have the habit of discussing events in other countries which while relevant to a discussion of Hungary, are not always clearly delineated in the text, especially as he moves on to other topics so quickly and one is never certain whether we are back in the Lands of the Crown of St Stephen or he is still discussing events elsewhere. Although Stone does cover the important topics sometimes the points he makes are lost among the extraneous detail which although interesting to know serves to blur his clarity and make it harder to follow his argument. To be fair in a work of this size the writer can only do so much when talking of politics, diplomacy, economics, society, war and culture and inevitably one feels a little rushed as we are carried along in the torrent of information. This book uses many works both in Hungarian and English as evident by the select bibliography included by the author and there are end notes for the references in each chapter, so Stone has not abandoned the critical apparatus of the historian as it may have been tempting to do in a work of this nature. I can’t recommend this work to a general reader who hasn’t a grounding in modern European history from 1815 onwards. There is too much that this historian takes for granted that the reader will already know about the Great Powers and his scattergun approach to personal biographies, economic and social data which mixes all these in his narrative moving back from one to another without much sense of structure can be confusing and requires re-reading at times. However if you have some existing historical knowledge of the period and want to know about Hungary in this context, then Stone will give you plenty to think about and perhaps encourage you to explore the subjects in other more specialised volumes that he can only briefly mention here.