I was proud of 'Robin Hood,' even though critics wrote negative things. But I had to laugh when this big, shaven-headed Hungarian stunt guy first saw me. He said, 'You Jonas? You playing Robin Hood? You need to go to the gym today.' So I thought, 'I'm going to show people.'
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
Of course I love cooking Eastern European food because I'm a Jew, but I also love making roast chicken. I love making Hungarian goulash. There are a lot of egg noodles in my cooking.
One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.
I was born in Vietnam, and I was adopted by an Irish lady and a Hungarian man, and then I moved to America.
Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'
In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.
I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.
Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.
My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.
