David Vaughan

November 17 1989 did not begin dramatically. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of nine Prague students who had led protests in 1939 against the German…

For a few weeks in the late summer of 1989, Prague became the scene of a bizarre – and now largely forgotten - refugee crisis. It had all begun in the spring, when Hungary…

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Canadian historian Gordon Skilling. As we have already reported on Radio Prague, the anniversary has been marked…

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…