Peter Janos had recently turned eighteen when he heard rumours that a demonstration was going to take place that day in Budapest. He and his classmates in the sixth form of his prestigious school were instructed not to attend which naturally made them all the more eager to do so. They could not have known that this ‘demonstration’ would turn into a major uprising which was to change forever the lives of those involved. The date was October 23rd 1956.
How I Became An Englishman is the story of one Hungarian boy growing up in a dysfunctional family, of life under Soviet Communism, of the first-hand experience of Revolution, of his hair-raising escape to safety in the (Shakespearean) England he had always dreamed of, and his gradual transformation into John Peter, Oxford graduate, author of Vladimir's Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination, and for nineteen years Chief Drama Critic of The Sunday Times.
