David Vaughan

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, “…

Did you know that one of Norway’s popular writers is actually Czech, or that in the mid 1930s Karel Čapek fell in love with the forests and skies of Scandinavia? And do…

For some years after the fall of communism, Czech audiences avoided any kind of theatre that might have been perceived as political. After decades of putting up with…

If Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ivana Trump were locked up together in one room, what would happen? In the world of theatre, anything is possible, and in Radka…

How have Czechs and Slovaks got used to the border between their two countries twenty years after the split of Czechoslovakia? A British journalist decided to find out by…

A traditional Czech toyshop is full of hums, whirrs, rattles and whistles; such is the diversity of the toys that for generations have been made in Bohemia and Moravia. In…

Ever since Jaroslav Hašek first thought him up in the early 1920s, the “Good Soldier Švejk” has been one of the best loved characters in Czech literature, as he undermines…

Over the last two years we have listened to sounds from the Czech Radio archives going back over eighty years. In this, the last of the series, we look at two of the big…

On 24 January 1935 one of the pioneers of radio in Germany was found lying in a pool of blood in a hotel room south of Prague. His story is one of the strangest and least…

While the split of Czechoslovakia happened quietly and almost unnoticed, the situation in Yugoslavia could hardly have been more different. There had always been close…