The London cab before its modification In the caring hands of Lenham Sports Cars, Ltd. Charles poses atop the improved taxicab Marianna, Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley, Ed’s grandmother, is among the sponsors of Teamdesertaxi Charles, Ed, and Max, about to set off

Three Britons are driving an old London taxicab they purchased off eBay from Hyde Park all the way across the Eurasian landmass to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Ed Monckton, Max Firman, and Charles Oliver — or “Teamdesertaxi” — are just one team among the scores taking part in this year’s “Mongol Rally” in order to raise money for MercyCorps Mongolia.

Teamdesertaxi found the old, dark blue London cab on eBay and had it specially modified for the route of many thousands of miles through England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovakia (an unintentional detour), Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. The route covers two continents as well as crossing three deserts and eleven mountain ranges.

Ed Monckton, a 20-year-old Art History student at University College London, is the ringleader of Teamdesertaxi, but participating in the Mongol Rally wasn’t actually his idea. “Jimmy Walker, an American journalist I met in Belgrade, emailed me in November last year and suggested it.”

Walker, 68, reported for ABC News for over twenty years. He became familiar with the charitable efforts of MercyCorps while teaching journalism in Mongolia.

“I decided that I would make sure that it happened rather than leaving it as a wild idea,” Ed explained. “Two school mates quickly jumped on board and here we are on the brink of doom I fear.”

The two school friends are Max Firman, an aeronautical engineering student at Bristol University, and Charles Oliver, studying astrophysics at UCL. “Max went to school with Ed where they skilfully perfected the art of getting in and out of trouble,” the Teamdesertaxi website explains, while “Charles is our resident linguist/spiv and will hopefully negotiate us out of any bribes or prison cells, furthering our efforts to raise sacks of cash”.

Eighteen countries, deserts, mountains — in a journey of eight thousand miles, what will be the greatest obstacle? “I think the hardest part will be the Gobi desert,” offered Ed. “Diesel stops are four hundred miles apart and we don’t have nearly that range. Last year more than half of the cars dropped out in the last thousand miles before Ulaanbaatar.”

And the most alluring? “I am definitely looking forward to Iran the most,” says Ed. “It should be quite an extraordinary experience and probably our last opportunity in a long time to go there. I cannot wait to get to Esfahan, the cradle of the Persian civilisation.”

While MercyCorps are the official charity of the Mongol Rally, Ed, Max, and Charles are also raising money for Help for Heroes, the charity only recently set up to help support Great Britain’s wounded servicemen that has attracted widespread support.

“Help for Heroes is a cause that is very close to us,” Ed told Norumbega. “We all are hoping to join the Army and two of us are in the ULOTC (University of London Officer Training Corps).” Ed explained that “the British public do not appreciate, respect, or support their servicemen in the same way that the U.S. public does.” Help for Heroes “is a wonderful charity aiming to change that, and to ensure that injured servicemen are looked after upon their return to the U.K.”

Hungarian soldiers bear the remains of Ferenc Fejto Fejto speaks at Imre Nagy’s tomb on his return to Hungary in 1989

Ferenc Fejto, the Hungarian emigré who became a noted French intellectual, has died just two months short of his ninety-ninth birthday. Fejto was, as Le Monde wrote in their obituary of him, “a pure product of the Habsburg empire”. “Taking his childhood vacations in the Italian resort of Fiume,” the Dublin Review of Books blog writes, “Fejto met there his cousins — who were Croats, Slovenes, Italians and Austrians. The common language was German, which the young Fejto learned alongside Hungarian, while he was also taught French by his governess.” As Ferenc László of Magyar Narancs wrote, Fejto’s partrimony was “that rapidly bourgeoisifying, ethnically and culturally diverse community within a Danubian monarchy that had meanwhile disintegrated”.

Fejto became a Communist in the 1930s and was the Paris correspondent of the Hungarian Social Democratic newspaper when the Second World War erupted. He served in the French Army until the Armistice and in the Resistance soon after. After the end of the European war, he became head of the press office at the Hungarian embassy in Paris, but resigned a few years later when his good friend László Rajk was subjected to a show-trial by the Communist authorities and executed. His seminal 1952 History of the People’s Democracies condemed the Stalinist governments behind the Iron Curtain and was translated into seventeen languages.

His uncompromising condemnations of the tyranny in his native land earned Fejto the emnity of many of his fellow leftists in France. “The French Left of the day was fairly hostile to any disparagement of Stalinism,” Ferenc László explains, “or, indeed, of the Marxism of the Eastern Bloc in general”. Sartre famously refused to read it, though he did later provide a foreword to Fejto’s work on the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

Fejto returned to Hungary just once, in 1989 for the historic reburial of the dissident Imre Nagy. His secretary at the time was Ágnes Széchenyi, now a senior fellow of the Institute of Literary History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

“Quite a few people refer to Fejto as being a historian,” Széchenyi wrote recently, “but that is not right either: he was an analytical commentator on the present day, being for decades one of Agence France-Presse’s expert correspondents, which is not a lesser position than being a historian – just different.”

“And no less a person than Professor Éva H. Balázs, that grand dame of history, was willing to acknowledge that. When a group of us were editing the international Hommage à Ferenc Fejto that was put out to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, we also asked her to contribute as one of the world’s authorities on the Enlightenment, since Fejto had himself written a well-regarded 1953 monograph on Emperor Joseph II, Un Habsbourg révolutionnaire: Joseph II. Portrait d’un despote éclairé. Professor Balázs sent us an unpublished manuscript on the emperor with a note in the margin that said, “Damn that Fejto! He spent two weeks in Vienna checking sources; I spent years. However, what he writes stands up; his instincts are enviably impressive.”)”

“‘To every thing there is a season… A time to be born, and a time to die,’ says Ecclesiastes. The Lord may have given just a few months short of ninety-nine years to Ferenc Fejto, who was on fairly good terms with Him, and even wrote a book about Him, but his death still strikes one as premature.”

H.M.E.H. Fra’ Matthew Festing

In accordance with long-standing custom, the Pope has received the head of the Order of Malta on St. John’s Day, the feast of the order’s patron. June 24 was the first St. John’s Day that His Holiness Benedict XVI received His Most Eminent Highness Fra’ Matthew Festing, who was elected Prince & Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in March following the death of his much-loved predecessor, Fra’ Andrew Bertie, in February.

The Order of Malta, officially the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and of Rhodes and of Malta, today has 12,000 knights & dames as members and over 80,000 permanent volunteers as well as 13,000 medical personnel. Unique in international law, it is a sovereign entity that enjoys diplomatic relations with over a hundred countries. Once an actively military order, it now lives out its motto «Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium Pauperum» (Defence of the Faith and help to the Poor) through countless charitable efforts on five continents.