The Spy Who Died of Boredom

George Mikes was a Hungarian-born British journalist, humourist and writer, best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries. George Mikes was born in 1912, in the small town of Siklós, in the southwest of Hungary. His father, Alfréd Mikes, was a successful lawyer, a profession in which he wanted his son to follow him. Mikes graduated in Budapest in 1933; he studied law and received his doctorate at Budapest University, after that he worked as a lawyer but at the same time he became a journalist and started to work for Reggel ("Morning"), a Budapest newspaper. For a short while he was the columnist of Intim Pista for Színházi Élet ("Theatre Life"), another newspaper in Budapest. In 1938 Mikes became the London correspondent for two Hungarian newspapers, Reggel and 8 Órai Ujság ("8 o'clock News") and he worked for the former until 1940. The experience of the German Jewish refugees coming to his home in Hungary for help after 1933 had left an abiding impression upon him. So in 1938, when Mikes had originally been sent to London to cover the Munich Crisis and expected to stay for only a couple of weeks, just one year before the outbreak of World War II he decided not to return to Hungary, and instead remained in England. He worked for the BBC's Hungarian Service from 1939 onwards, interrupted only by his internment as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man in 1940. Living in exile in England, he broadcast to Hungary for the BBC during World War II, and also collaborated with the Hungarian emigration[clarification needed], and wrote political cabaret for the London Podium, a Hungarian theatre in London at that time. From 1939 he also made documentaries for the BBC Hungarian section, at first as a freelance correspondent and, from 1950, as an employee.[5] He was naturalised as a British citizen in 1946. In 1956 he went back to Hungary to cover the Hungarian Revolution for BBC TV. From 1975 until his death on 30 August 1987 he also worked for the Hungarian section of Radio Free Europe. He was president of the London branch of PEN, and a member of the Garrick Club. Mikes wrote in both Hungarian and English, for The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, Encounter, Irodalmi Újság, Népszava, the Viennese Hungarian-language Magyar Híradó, and Világ. His friends included the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, whose biography Mikes wrote (Arthur Koestler; the story of a friendship); J. B. Priestley; academic Doireann MacDermott; and André Deutsch, whose publishing house promoted Mikes as a writer. He married twice and had a son called Martin by his first marriage, and a daughter called Judith by his second. He died in London on 30 August 1987. On 15 September 1991, a memorial plaque was unveiled at his childhood home.

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