Society

In the aftermath of Péter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orbán’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda három napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days. Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of World War Two and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials. We all have

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – “Here’s the wannabe Jew” – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: “You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.” A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

It was just after seeing my first resplendent quetzal that I hatched my crazy plan to visit Colombia. I was in the Costa Rican cloud forest at the time and my guide – you need a guide because the birds are impossible to spot without someone who a) can identify the different calls and b) carries a $2,000 Swarovski Optik monocular – said, “Of course, if you really like this sort of thing the place to go is Colombia.” Costa Rica, delightful though it is, only has around 900 species of bird. Colombia, on the other hand, has nearly 2,000 (including 83 endemics: i.e., ones you can find nowhere else),