Hungary’s Holy Trinity
What connects a Hollywood star, a physicist of genius and a recently departed historian?
The broadcaster and historian Matthew Sweet, who recently debunked in a very public manner the claims of Naomi Wolf that there were widespread executions of gay men in Victorian Britain, drew my attention to one of the most extraordinary autobiographies of the 20th century.
Zsa Zsa Gabor’s One Lifetime is Not Enough, in whose writing the much-married Hollywood film star was ‘assisted by, edited by and put into proper English by Wendy Leigh’, is full of striking episodes, not least the revelation that, at the age of 15, Gabor lost her virginity to Kemal Atatürk, the father of the modern Turkish republic. ‘For the rest of my life’, she claimed, ‘I would search for another God to eclipse him.’ Which may explain a lot.
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