It didn’t take Thomas Hobbes to convince me that life could be nasty, brutish and short. That was done in November 1956 by the flickering black-and-white images on our family TV. Soviet tanks in Budapest were firing into crowds of protesters, blasting away at barricades and buildings, and in turn being set ablaze with Molotov cocktails hurled furiously by demonstrators. If well aimed, they burned the tanks’ crews alive. One vivid image still remains with me: that of the mutilated body of a Communist secret policeman who had been lynched by a furious mob and left hanging by his feet from a tree.

Rarely mentioned is that this was close to a replay of what had taken place there just a decade before, during the final months of the Second World War. Budapest had been a thriving cosmopolitan capital, a city of superlatives certainly more beautiful, holds Adam LeBor, than its Austrian counterpart, Vienna. It also proved a haven for ‘the legion of charmers, fixers and opportunists floating through the city’s demi-monde’. Spies of all nations flourished amid its rough and ready cast of characters.

In 1945 it emerged a wreck from a lengthy siege and bombardment by the Red Army. All seven bridges across the Danube had been blown up and only one in four buildings remained intact; 80 per cent of the city was damaged. About eighty thousand Soviet troops had lost their