1. When did you arrive in Hungary and what brought you here?
My first ever trip to Budapest was in the early 1960s. Those were the darkest days of The Cold War. Both Hungary as well as her proud but then dowdy, dirty capital were very tightly-controlled by the Soviets and Communists.

The faces of the people were as grey and grim as the grime on the buildings. Stoic despair was pervasive. That visit introduced me to totalitarianism on first-person terms. My then-girlfriend’s mother had friends in Budapest she hadn’t seen for years.

My friend and I travelled as her mother’s well-laden emissaries to her Hungarian gal pals. We were asked to deliver green coffee beans, Bic pens and the sort of grey fold-up plastic raincoats that were useful for bartering. Barter was the only way to get what was really needed, and that was all only available on the black market.

One friend was the wife of a professional man whose offices were in the Hotel Gellert.
The other was a lady of noble birth. Pre-War, she served on the mathematics faculty of the university. Thereafter, due to her lineage, she had been declared essentially too ‘anti-revolutionary’ to practice her profession. ‘Education’ of university students had to conform to Marxist diktat.

This woman had been reduced to the tiniest flat I’d ever seen, then or since.
“Soul-destroying oppression” defined the task the Commissars had devised for this hyper-intelligent lady. Each week, armed troops would deliver to her cubbyhole two wide, flat boards. Arrayed across each were rows of yellow plastic ducks, the sort children play with in a bathtub.

Her task? Painting in the eyes, large black dots onto these lumps of plastic. Here was the prescription of how to drive a mathematician to despair.

2. Have you ever been an expatriate elsewhere?
Yes, twice. Vienna, Austria at the University of Vienna for one-year, and in London, England, 20 years. Son born in London.

3. What surprised you most about Hungary?
The splendor of both the cities and countryside and the wry humor of the people

4. Friends are in Budapest for a weekend - what must they absolutely see and do?
Performance at the Opera and sampling one each of every pastry at Hauer’s.

5. What is your favourite Hungarian food?
Everything my cardiologist damns &/or forbids, which is most everything!

6. What is never missing from your refrigerator?
Apples and, usually, a well-chilled bottle of white wine.

7. What is your favourite Hungarian word?
Any word I seem to pronounce ‘properly’ only after too many glasses of pálinka and too little coffee!

8. What do you miss most from home?
American gridiron college football

9. What career other than yours would you love to pursue?
Conducting (orchestral, not a bus conductor)

10. What's a job you would definitely never want?
Sewers tour guide, in Istanbul, Vienna, wherever.

11. Where did you spend your last vacation?
Southern California

12. Where do you hope to spend your next holiday?
Israel

13. What was your favourite band, film, or hobby as a teen?
‘The Third Man’ Honest.

14. What can't you resist?
Apart from my bride of 40 years, hyper-talented sopranos. Example: the late Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’ Vier letzte Lieder, recorded at Watford Town Hall, 1954.

15. Red wine or white?
Red

16. Book or movie?
Book, mostly histories and international affairs. Strongly suggest “Nothing to Envy – Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick, Published by Speigel & Grau

17. Morning person or night person?
Matters not; I work all the time anyway.

18. Which social issue do you feel most strongly about?
Islamist fascism, especially the hugely disadvantaged legal position of females under Sharia law, including especially the forced clitorectomies of little girls.

19. Buda or Pest side?
Pest

20. What would you say is your personal motto?
“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.” Sir Winston Churchill