Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things.
And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York to Bermuda for a tennis tournament. I remember the news about Budapest and Suez being passed back to the cabin from the cockpit, and the players on board being far more interested in whether we’d play the best of three or best of five, and other such petty details.
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