‘[Elvira Valentini] had always been interested in the flora of the Balkans…She thought that in Fiume, after teaching, she would explore the countryside and continue her scientific work. But that was not to be. A few months later, war broke out, and her family called Elvira home, asking her to stay there. The shot fired in Sarajevo thus marked not only the beginning of the First World War, but also the end of an ambitious Hungarian woman’s scientific career.’

‘Zsolnay was special because, in addition to its aristocratic and wealthy foreign customers, it always thought of the ordinary person, too. In the last century, there was hardly a household without at least one Zsolnay white bowl or a milk jug, wine bucket, or baking mould from the distinctive pink collection. Here, high quality was matched by an amazing quantity.’

András Berkesi wrote a multitude of spy stories and adventure novels, becoming one of the star authors of the era, and was also awarded the Attila József Prize. Officially, no one has ever held him accountable for torturing, humiliating, and handing over people to the Russians to be taken to the gulag.

‘It became common knowledge that Neumann was actually some kind of demigod masquerading as a human being for some reason. A Martian, a demigod, anything but this worldly being, who stands out from the rest…Contemporary scientists, the military, and the world of politics all used his skills, his brain, in exactly the same way we use computers today. It was not without reason that Albert Szent-Györgyi declared Neumann to have had the most brilliant human mind ever.’