David Vaughan

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…

Comic books and graphic novels are rapidly becoming a popular and recognized form of Czech literature and they build on a tradition in this country that goes back well…

Ivan Klíma described the 2009 novel Three Faces of an Angel by Jiří Pehe as one of the most outstanding Czech novels since the fall of communism. The book is not only an…

It is not often that one book receives two major Czech literary awards within a few weeks, but that is just what happened at the end of last year in the case of Martin…

We are in Prague’s Jewish Ghetto at the end of the 17th century. A young boy dies under mysterious circumstances. Did he die of natural causes or was it murder? This real…

Every language has its own rhythms and melodies, and these influence the way we speak foreign languages too. However hard we try, we nearly always end up imposing the…

If you have ever used a computer translation program you will know what curious things machines can come up with, as they try to cope with the complexities and ambiguities…

Even if you have never read anything by the great German novelist Thomas Mann, you will almost certainly have come across Visconti’s film of his most famous novella, “…