David Vaughan

If you tune in to Czech Radio on New Year’s Day, at some point you will hear the stirring tones of the presidential fanfare, introducing the president’s annual address to…

When a Czech poet goes on a reading tour of the United States, it can sometimes have unexpected consequences. For Sylva Fischerová the result was a book that offers some…

The expression “jako kůl v plotě” – “like a fencepost” - entered Czech folklore in the summer of 1989. The date was July 17 and Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party chief…

In the second half of the 1980s the sweeping reforms in the Soviet Union were being echoed in several of the country’s Eastern Bloc satellites. But in Czechoslovakia there…

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, it heralded a revolution in Soviet-American relations. At a series of high-profile summits, beginning in Geneva…

In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan meets the poet and novelist, Olga Walló. In recent years she has become something of a literary phenomenon in the Czech Republic…

The year is 1984, and Ivan Lendl plays the winning point against John McEnroe in the final of the French Open in Paris, one of eight Grand Slam singles titles in his…

Any history of Czechoslovakia’s dissident movement in the 1970s will include more than a passing reference to the writer, editor and translator Paul Wilson. Originally…

Last year in this programme I played some archive recordings from the pre-war gatherings of the “Sokol” movement, which brought together tens of thousands of people in…

Part of the American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a threat to boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. The Soviet troops stayed put and the…