Bob Dent has lived in Budapest since 1986. Born in 1949 in the north of England, his education, which he prefers to call ‘schooling’, took place in Harrogate, then Leeds and later at the London School of Economics. He has worked as a milk delivery assistant, a grass-cutter for a municipal authority, a warehouse packer, a van driver in London delivering toilet towel rolls, a heavy goods lorry driver making deliveries to shops in Liverpool, a long-distance lorry driver (well, at least for one day), a printer’s typesetter and layout artist, a bookseller (the shop he helped to establish now being Liverpool’s oldest bookshop), a media researcher, a journalist, (and from now on in Hungary) a freelance feature writer for British newspapers and magazines, a media production manager, a ‘fixer’ for visiting television crews, an occasional radio broadcaster, a voice-over narrator for film recordings, a guidebook writer and researcher, a tour guide, a Hungarian resources coordinator for an international school, a copy editor for translations, a book reviewer and an amateur historian. He is reluctant to call himself a writer, believing that might be legitimate when he has had ten works published.


Gambling with life on Hungary’s death row
Inadvertently insulting a cardinal
Fearing to photograph Lenin
Roaming north, south, east and west
Tackling the meaning of Trianon
Scrutinising the shibboleths of 1956

Bob Dent does not ‘reveal all’, as is commonly hyped about authors on the back cover of their works. Instead, he recounts a few tales of experience and notes certain insights he thinks he has gained into his very own and sometimes peculiar Hungary.