David Vaughan

After the split of Czechoslovakia at the beginning of 1993, Radio Prague devoted several programmes to the impact of the new border on ordinary people’s lives. For most…

We have featured plenty of contemporary Czech novelists in this programme over the last decade, but we should spare a thought for their translators, patiently working at…

One of the more curious aspects of Radio Prague in the early 1990s was that the station’s name kept changing. In 1991, for no particular reason, we stopped calling…

The death on October 12 of the Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha at the age of 95 marked the end of an era. Since the end of WWII, her home had been Prague, where she…

In the early 1990s it wasn’t just political change that was on Radio Prague’s agenda. In many ways the social changes under way at the time were just as radical. Dogs had…

One of the most passionate debates in Czechoslovakia in the first years after the fall of communism was over what to do with people who had collaborated with the secret…

When the Slovak writer Pavol Rankov published his novel “It Happened on September the First (or Whenever)” in 2009, it came just after the Slovak national football team…

With the fall of communism, it was not long before foreign investors began taking an interest in Czechoslovakia. This ranged from huge industrial multinationals to young…

Last week I promised some recordings from Radio Prague in the early 1990s, but I hope you’ll forgive me for taking a break in our chronological journey through the…

Born in 1946, Aleš Macháček, has been through experiences that it is hard for people from the west to imagine. In 1977 he was sentenced to three years in prison for…