[4] In 1938 Mikes became the London correspondent for two Hungarian newspapers, Reggel and 8 Órai Ujság ("8 o'clock News") and he worked for the former until 1940.
So in 1938, when Mikes had originally been sent to London to cover the Munich Crisis and expected to stay for only a couple of weeks, just one year before the outbreak of World War II he decided not to return to Hungary, and instead remained in England.
[7] Mikes wrote in both Hungarian and English, for The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, Encounter, Irodalmi Újság, Népszava, the Viennese Hungarian-language Magyar Híradó, and Világ.
B. Priestley; academic Doireann MacDermott;[8] and André Deutsch, whose publishing house promoted Mikes as a writer.
In his subsequent books Mikes blended local jokes into his own humour, dealt with (among others) Japan (The Land of the Rising Yen), Israel (Milk and Honey, The Prophet Motive), the US (How to Scrape Skies), the United Nations (How to Unite Nations), Australia (Boomerang), the British again (How to be Inimitable and How to be Decadent, both collected with How to be an Alien as How to be a Brit), and South America (How to Tango).
Apart from his commentaries, he wrote humorous fiction (Mortal Passion; The Spy Who Died of Boredom) and contributed to the satirical television series That Was The Week That Was.
[10] According to Thomas Kabdebo [hu], himself a Hungarian immigrant writer, Mikes' favourite comic device was to place himself as an inveterate yet vulnerable traveller; an ardent rationalist with European values, where he discovers national pretensions behind proud phraseology.