He had changed his name after being cheated out of an inheritance, and Bolgar said in later life that but for this misfortune of his father's, instead of becoming a Cambridge don, he might well have been a landowner in Moravia who supported the Nazis and been liquidated by the Russians in 1945.

[1] When the Second World War began in September 1939, Bolgar's father was Second Secretary at the Hungarian Legation in London, and the Kingdom of Hungary was one of the Axis powers.

For eighteen months he was posted to Ranchi in the Bihar Province of British India, in command of an educational centre which suffered from many sudden transfers of its instructors.

[1] After returning from India, Bolgar spent eight years as a research fellow at King's, developing the work for his thesis into a book, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, which was finally published in 1954.

[1] This deals with a process lasting a thousand years and includes sections on classical studies in Ireland and Britain 450–600, the Anglo-Saxon schools 650–800, the educational reforms of Charlemagne, a chapter on Byzantine culture,[3] and appendices which list the translations from Greek and Roman classical authors before 1600 and the Greek manuscripts in Italy during the fifteenth century.

Bolgar invited them to his own house, where they met his mother and were astonished at the survival of a refined form of Hungarian society dating from the early years of the 20th century.

They lived in the villages of Girton and Great Wilbraham, both near Cambridge, where Bolgar developed an interest in local history as a recreation.