A lot to answer for

One of my former bosses, a man of Czech ancestry, once said to me ‘A Hungarian is the only person who can go into a revolving door behind you and come out in front’. I can only imagine that the residents of a country that has been through so many invasions and revolutions over the years must have a certain spirit of ingenuity. Erno Rubik, the mathematician who developed his eponymous cube was a Hungarian, as was a newspaper editor called Laszlo Biro. Biro was fed up with his leaky fountain pen and smudged writing, so with his brother, an industrial chemist, he looked for a solution, and came up with the ballpoint.