Tibor Szamuely
The death of Tibor Szamuely on Sunday is a great loss to his friends and to this country, of which he was a naturalised and most loyal son. It is also a particular loss to The Spectator. Over the years, Tibor had become one of our most regular, most valued and most expert of contributors. He was a great controversialist — his attack on the File on the Tsar programme — spiritedly defended by its author and producer — provoked a splendid running row in our correspondence columns. He had an improbable life, and he was, indeed, an improbable figure, with a command of English, both spoken and written, which very few English-born people ever achieve. He loved using this command: he loved talking and he loved writing so much that more often than not he talked too much and he wrote too long. This we would tell him, when he was alive. Now that he has died prematurely — he was only forty-eight—we know that he did not talk or write a word too much.
Kingsley Amis writes: Tibor was one of the rarest of creatures, somebody it was a constant joy to meet. The very sight of that jaunty, square-set figure, pipe in mouth, eyes beaming behind their spectacles with the anticipation of recounting some incredible titbit from Kazahh-stanshaya Pravda or freshly-unearthed intellectual atrocity from nearer home, offered a promise of enlightenment and entertainment that ws5 invariably kept. He was a man of strong dislikes (and reasons for dislike), but tlisd tirades were always full of humour vivacity, devoid of bitterness, delivered 0' and with a style few native-b°'o Englishmen could equal. And his affection5 were as strong or stronger: for his faintlY; for his' friends, for English literature--bero again' he showed an appreciation beyoll the reach of most of his adopted felloic countrymen — and for England. He had earned the right to that Igsl affection. As he once said to me, " sled inherited your life here willy-nilly. I olt01r it," and, he would have been justified adding, attained it by resource 811,1 bravery. He had his own, fully self-aws'el brand of Englishness; I shall never forfi the mixture of genuine outrage all, parodied jingoism with which he answer) a waitress's innocent question about wilicit sort of mustard he wanted with his stetio "English!" — as if the profenrill alternative had been. not French. 13
Paraguayan or Sudanese. rill' At our first meeting after his natu,,,
isation in 1969, he told me, "You this makes everything all right. Even dn. I'll be able to tell myself that at least in England. "When that end approached' j cruelly soon afterwards, I hope he 0511, little comforted by that thought. At „ev rate, as everybody who knew him vittlii glad to know, it waa painless e
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