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Beginning of article

TREASURES FROM BUDAPEST Royal Academy, W1 ILAST wandered round the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest in March 1987, when the communists were still in power and even art historians spoke in whispers for fear that anything overheard might be misinterpreted.

The handsome late Neoclassical building, completed in 1906 and very old-fashioned for the time, was in a sorry state, its various roofs leaking and many of its masterpieces draped in sheets of polythene to protect them when rain fell. I knew the building had suffered a direct hit from a bomb in the last months of the Second World War (though not whether this had been dropped by Anglo- American forces or the Russians, who …