David Vaughan

Ever since the publication of the first Czech translation of Longfellow’s Hiawatha in the 1860s, Czechs have had a special affection for the American West. This was always…

In the spring of 1945, just before he ended his six-year exile in Britain, President Edvard Beneš gave an address in English that was broadcast by the BBC. The fight to…

Any list of the top five Czech novels since the fall of communism should include The Sound of the Sundial by Hana Andronikova. This epic love story takes us from pre-war…

One of the early atrocities of World War Two was the violent suppression of protests by Czech university students on 28 October 1939. This was just over six months after…

We have often drawn from Czech Radio’s sound archives in our broadcasts, as they make up one of the richest radio archives in the world, offering insight into the history…

Jana Kotaishová grew up in the countryside of Southern Moravia, but when she married a Palestinian refugee over three decades ago, she embarked on a life that was far…

There are some novels that take us on a journey to a place, either real or imagined; others take us into the world of the mind. Every now and then a novelist manages to do…

A few years ago several boxes of wartime radio recordings from London were found lying forgotten in an attic at the Czech Foreign ministry. Some are in English and some in…

Fifty years ago, on 1 May 1965, annual student festivities in Prague to mark the joys of spring culminated in the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg being declared “Král…

Forty years ago this week, on 8 April 1975, Václav Havel sent an open letter to Czechoslovakia’s President Gustav Husák. The letter was to become one of the key documents…