Latest news with #HungarianRevolution
Daily Record
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix fans have just days to watch 'sexy' period drama with near perfect rating
The enthralling and 'steamy' historical drama — set in 1956 during the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution — is currently streaming on Netflix, but will depart from the streamer on June 5. British television drama series The Hour was first broadcast on BBC Two when it made its series premiere back in 2011. Starring Ben Whishaw, Dominic West, and Romola Garai, supported by Burn Gorman, Anna Chancellor, Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson, Anton Lesser, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and Oona Chaplin, the riveting historical drama has been penned by Brick Lane screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also serves as one of the executive producers on the show). With hour-long episodes across its two series, the show was mostly filmed in Hornsey Town Hall and its lead director was Coky Giedroy. The Hour is currently streaming on Netflix, but will depart from the streamer on June 5. Centred around a fictional current-affairs show being launched by the World Service in June 1956, The Hour is set in a BBC newsroom at the time of the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. It follows maverick journalist Freddie Lyon (Whishaw), ambitious producer Bel (Garai), and enigmatic anchor Hector (West) as they launch the investigative news show — The Hour. Drama and tensions run high as the three protagonists become embroiled in a steamy love triangle, playing out against the backdrop of a cryptic murder. Set in the ruthless area of sexual politics, The Hour is a show that redefines the historical drama. Speaking to Digital Spy about what he felt when he first walked onto The Hour's set, actor Dominic West said: 'It's extraordinary, the detail. You get a sheet of paper which I have to hold while I'm being broadcast, which is in the background anyway. There's no way it'll ever be on screen, and yet it's a detailed timetable or list of detailed questions as it would have been." Actress Romola Garai also talked about her experience filming for the show and said: "You'll sometimes get someone say to you, 'Do you want something to hold?' because quite often it's nice to have a prop or something. "So you'll get a piece of paper and it's normally just the lunch menu! You'll get a piece of paper on this job and it'll be typed from a Corona typewriter and it'll be the schedule for a made-up show that isn't even in the script with all period dates of the shows that we would be covering. I think the production design might have OCD! It's really, really accurate." With a smashing 94 per cent rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, The Hour has been lauded by critics as well as audiences. One critic wrote: 'With its casting, its look, its unfolding mysteries, its attention to important historical events, its sexiness, The Hour hits every pleasure centre.' While another said: 'A gripping thrill-ride of a show; escapist and stylish despite playing a bit fast and loose with historical accuracy at times.' Another positive review added: 'The Hour is alternately ferocious and tender, and refreshingly clear-eyed about the interactions between gender and class,' and one reviewer observes: 'What makes it so engaging is that it works so well with and within the strictures of the well-thumbed genres it combines in equal parts: spy thriller, murder mystery, backstage drama, triangular romance.' Praise for director Abi Morgan also ran abound, with one viewer saying: 'Outstanding show: fantastic script by Abi Morgan who also did River and The Split and outstanding performances. Season 2 was even better than season one. The best show we saw this year! I just hope we see more shows from Abi Morgan. She is so talented.' Another audience review calls The Hour a 'fab series' that's witty and has 'great sets and clothes'. Commending the 'superb line up of the cream of actors', the audience review further states that the show is 'well cast', however 'the pace is a bit odd but it's great evening watching.'
Hindustan Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The story of maimed nationalisms
'On your feet, Magyar,' wrote Sándor Petőfi, Hungary's national poet, 'the homeland calls'. So opens his iconic poem, Nemzeti Dal, or 'national song'. This line became the heartbeat of inspiration for the Hungarian Revolution against the Hapsburg Monarchy in 1848, a historic event that watchers of the Netflix show, The Empress may have relived recently. But the poet Petőfi himself never returned to his homeland. He died in one of the last battles of the revolution, his body never recovered. As I stood before Petőfi tomb this Spring, my mind went blank, gaping with questions about nationalism and war, and the missing body of the martyr. In the heart of the famous Fiumei Road Graveyard in Budapest, the Petőfi family grave holds the remains of his family members, even those of his son – but the man who gave the nation these unforgettable lines of patriotism could not get back on his feet to return to his homeland. Unlike the great English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, who lost his life in his idealistic immolation in the Greek War of Independence but had his body returned to family vault at Hucknall Torkard in England, the Hungarian national poet remains a towering presence in his very gaping absence in his family tomb in Budapest's famous cemetery. The nationalism of maimed nations is a powerful and dangerous thing. Located right in the core of Europe, Hungary has struggled against just about every current flowing through the continent, crushed by many, resilient against some. Overpowered by the mighty Ottoman Empire in the Middle Ages, dominated by the monumental Habsburg Monarchy in the 18th and the 19th centuries, oppressed by Nazism and eventually wrung dry by Soviet communism in the 20th, this is a nation that has been on a traumatised margins of Europe for an eternity. Now on its own after the fall of the Berlin wall, it has repeatedly reached back to the great linguistic and literary nationalisms of the 19th century, immortalised in the words of poets like Sándor Petőfi and Ferenc Kölcsey. But quickly, these invocations turned intolerant and jingoistic under the leadership of the Fidesz party, whose leader Viktor Orbán has proudly declared Hungary to be an 'illiberal democracy'. This state oppresses its own indigenous Roma gypsy community, fans hatred against immigrants, equates queer people with paedophiles, and bans Pride Marches. In its fervour to fight its oppressors, the oppressed has now turned oppressor. Language, literature and music have long been witness and conscience to the nationalism of dominated nations. Deprived of voice and power in the realms of economy and statecraft, suppressed peoples have sung their longings through their bards. The force of their voices is no less than air-raid sirens that pierce through night skies, no less pervasive than the blanket blackouts that blind cities and countries. But what happens when the voice of the traumatised drowns out the voices beneath themselves? That has, historically been the destiny of maimed nationalisms – that they fight by maiming others less privileged than them, whose cries they cannot hear, deafened as they are by their own trauma. Literature has borne witness to such uneven struggles beautifully. When Irish nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries claimed the Celtic twilight to sing the beauty of Gaelic peasantry and their myths and legends, it equated its nation with the identity of the Celt, excluding diverse groups that had come to call Ireland home at that time. This was the great literary nationalism of WB Yeats, Lady Gregory, JM Synge, whose poems and plays celebrated the myths and legends of Ireland against the oppressive impact of British colonialism. But fighting its own battle against imperialism, Celtic Ireland had no place for the Jewish people who called it home and brazenly paved the way for anti-Semitism as part of its nationalistic identity. Against the chroniclers of lyric poetry and poetic plays, the arch-modern novelist and chronicler of the contemporary James Joyce crafted his great novel Ulysses with an ordinary Jewish ad-canvassor, Leopold Bloom as its protagonist – its striking mock-hero, if you will. Joyce found the nationalism of the Celtic twilight suffocating and provincial, and intolerant enough to exclude outsiders. Hence his novelistic vision of twentieth century Ireland parted company of the lyricism of the poems and plays that sought to celebrate its past and mythical glories. War cries on the battlefield have inevitably drawn out flowing, rivers of words and music – in print, performance, and now on social media. That is the nature of humanity under the crushing force of attack and oppression. The will to live and thrive creates poetry and performance of a kind that refuses to be throttled. But this will is also of a blinded and blinding kind that refuses to see anything else. The two world wars in Europe saw a flood of patriotic poems and songs that eventually turned into dirges for dying soldiers whose death, in the end, felt utterly meaningless. No better picture than the quick path from the patriotic poetry of Rupert Brooke to the existentialist, even nihilistic poetry of Wilfred Owen, who died in the trenches at the age of twenty-five. But shortly before the English fought the Germans in Europe, they crushed the Afrikaaners, or the Boers – the Dutch-derived people of South Africa in the deadly violence of the Anglo-Boer War of 1902, where they organised the world's first concentration camps – even before the Nazis perfected the science of these death-traps in the second world war. The English maimed and tortured Boer women and children in the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer war, eventually forcing the Boers to a crushing surrender. What was the result of that crushing defeat? The Boers, forever a second-tier white race in South Africa below the sophisticated, capitalist imperialism of the English, realised that there was nothing but their white skin that kept them from the bare-bones poverty and trauma of the Bantu tribes, the racially mixed 'coloured' people, and the descendants of indentured labourers from Asia. Hurting from their own pain and humiliation, they came up with an aggressive nationalism that, in the name of celebrating their Afrikaaner identity, erected one of the most divisive and unequal social systems ever known to humanity. This was Aparthood in English, in Afrikaans, Apartheid – different rules of life, location, movement, education, marriage, family, property, everything, for different races classified under law. Come into existence in 1948, when the whole world was getting ready for decolonisation movements and soon, into the Civil Rights movements, this system of great inequality lasted through most of the 20th century, only to come to an end in 1994. It wasn't with no reason that Nelson Mandela's striking biography was called The Long Walk to Freedom. When I walked along Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town a couple of years back, from Mandela's tiny cell to the shores of freedom, the magnitude and weight of that shackled walk shook me to the core. That too, was the consequence of a subaltern nationalism running rogue, casting death, destruction, and torture on everybody beneath them. Having lived and worked in close historical proximity of many of these toxic nationalisms that started as legitimate struggles against oppression, I feel deeply troubled by my eroding faith in nationalism itself. The Quebecois nationalism, in the French province of Quebec, against the dominance of English Canada is another one I experienced in close quarters during my years in that country. The Quebecois could see their own marginalisation clearly enough, but were blind to the oppression they carried out to the indigenous peoples right in their midst, people who had stakes in neither English nor French Canada. But who cared about them, and who listened to their languages? There is nothing like our own trauma and suffering to blind us to the suffering of others. At a moment of intensity, one cannot but have empathy for this blindness. But it is the work of song, words, and narratives to bring out the layers of complexities within suffering. This is why the sound of music and poetry, in the long run, outlasts the piercing cry of blackout sirens. The sirens over our heads is loud. But the poems will last longer, and will celebrate those whose souls are carried away by bombs. The empty presence of the national poet in the Petőfi family grave holds more than the thousands of bodies buried all through the Fiumei Road Graveyard. A novelist and critic, Saikat Majumdar is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
"Union without Ukraine": Hungarian PM posts list of demands for Brussels
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has published a post on social media with a caption "What the Hungarian nation wants from Brussels". Source: Orbán on Facebook, as reported by European Pravda Details: This list is a reformulated list of the so-called 12 points – a summary of the demands of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution (1848-1849). Among the Hungarian prime minister's current political messages are that he "wants a Europe of nations", sovereignty and "a strong veto for national governments", but he also "demands" that "[George] Soros' agents be expelled from the European Commission" and "corrupt lobbyists be removed from parliament". He also demands a ban on the "unnatural re-education" of children, as well as the protection of Europe's "Christian heritage". The last item on Orban's list of demands reads: "Union, but without Ukraine". For reference: Hungary commemorates the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849 on 15 March. The revolution resulted in a radical transformation of the social and political system of the Hungarian kingdom, proclaimed independence from the Habsburgs and established a democratic state. The revolutionary leaders' list of 12 demands included, among other things, the granting of democratic freedoms, the withdrawal of Austrian troops from the country, the return of Hungarian units to their homeland, the establishment of an independent government, etc. Background: Orbán is expected to speak in Budapest on the anniversary of the revolution. According to Telex, leaflets with Orbán's 12 points were distributed near the venue of his speech. Meanwhile, European Pravda's sources said that during the discussion of the draft resolution of the European Council on 20-21 March, Hungarian representatives again insisted on reducing the section on Ukraine by removing references to continued military support for Ukraine and peace from a position of strength. Orbán refused to sign the resolution of the 6 March extraordinary European Council meeting on support for Ukraine, and as a result, 26 of the 27 EU states agreed on the text. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
