Background:

• My passionate interest in maps began when I was eight.

 
• Soon I discovered that frontiers in the past were different and had kept on changing. By the age of eleven my interest in maps focused on historical ones.

 
• At the University of Budapest I studied history, primarily to enable myself to work with historical maps. (My other subject was Spanish.)

 
• In 1972, I was delegated by the Faculty of Eastern European History to partake in the International Exhibition and Conference at Budapest on Historical Map Making as their representative. I contributed my own map, and presented a paper.

 
• I acquired my degree in 1974 on completion of five years of study. My thesis was on boundary changes in Eastern and Central Europe 1525-1914.

 
• I worked as a Freelance Historical Map Editor in Budapest for various Hungarian employers, taking part especially in three major projects.

 
• I left Hungary in 1978 for political reasons. Settled in London, where I acquired training in Cartography.

 
• I worked as a Free-lance Historical Map Editor, and as a Cartographer for many British publishers, and for some employers in other countries, including the United States. Apart from compiling and editing historical maps, I drew various types of maps, in a variety of styles. Some of these were for guide books, others were for educational, military, academic or general purposes. Currently I prepare my maps using an Apple Macintosh.

 
• There have been in particular ten major projects that I was involved in as an Historical Cartographer, while in London.

 
• My collection of Historical Atlases that I assembled over a period of years consists of hundreds of volumes, published in 61 countries in 40 languages. (This is without counting my atlases that are purely geographical, or of a different thematic content, that can also be useful references.) Mine is likely to be among the largest existing private collections of its kind.

 
• I published several critical treatises on atlases in The Times (of London) and in Hungarian language academic or other learned journals in Hungary and in the US.

 
• I published a thesis titled Civilizations towards a World Civilization that reviews the current of World History from the angle of Political Geography in Földrajzi Értesítö, and later again in'2000' (in Hungarian).

 
• I published a thesis titled Central Europe - a Western Landscape that contributes to the debate on the meaning of Central Europe and offers a coherent definition of its extent in Regio (in Hungarian).

 
• My lecture "Maps and History" was held at Cambridge in 2001 at the invitation of the History Society of Corpus Christi.

 
• Radio Bristol of the BBC conducted an interview with me in connection with the success of a new edition of the Times Atlas of European History, the maps of which I authored. (2001, in paperback: The Times History of Europe.)

 
• Commanding Heights, a WGBH website that I was involved with as their Consultant on Historical Maps, was honoured in 2002 with an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in their Online Learning category.