David Vaughan

2014 is a year of anniversaries: 25 years since the fall of communism, 15 years since the Czech Republic joined NATO and 10 years since the country joined the European…

In the last Czech Books we met the artist Helga Weissová-Hošková, who talked about her remarkable wartime diaries. She drew and described what she saw and experienced in…

When the wartime diaries and drawings of Helga Weissová were published in Britain last year, they caused quite a stir. Up to that time they had been all but forgotten…

At the end of last month, Prague hosted an international conference to discuss some of the issues determining the direction of today’s Europe. The event was organized by…

A new statue is to be unveiled in Prague in honour of over two thousand Czechs and Slovaks who fought in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II. The idea is to…

“Socrates on the Equator”, the latest book by the award-winning Czech novelist, Tomáš Zmeškal, offers insights into a huge country in the heart of Africa that for most…

Until last year Karel Jaromír Erben’s celebrated collection of ballads, Kytice – The Bouquet – had never been published in a full English translation. Now we are lucky…

In this programme two quite exceptional people tell their own story. It is a tale of courage, resilience and a touch of luck, but above all of the enduring power of love…

The work of the novelist Marek Toman is diverse. It takes us from Jewish Prague in the 16th century all the way to the drama of the Velvet Revolution four hundred years…

The Czech Republic and Hungary are countries of similar size with plenty of history in common, whether we look back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the…