David Vaughan

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…

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…

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…

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…

For a few weeks just after the fall of communism, Radio Prague went silent. Its days as a tool in the Cold War were over. After huge staff cuts, and with the old communist…

On November 17 1990, the first anniversary of the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, George Bush Sr. became the first American president to visit Czechoslovakia in the…

Jaroslav Hašek is known the world over for his epic satirical novel, “The Good Soldier Švejk”. It tells of the adventures of a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army…