David Vaughan

Sixty-nine years ago this week, on March 14 1939, the Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha spoke to the nation. He had just returned from Berlin, where Hitler had given him a…

This Friday was the 69th anniversary of one of the defining moments of World War II, the destruction of the village of Lidice near Prague by the Nazis on June 10th 1942…

The six months leading up to the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 were a strange period. After Germany, Poland and Hungary had annexed over a quarter…

One of the highpoints of last month’s Bookworld international book fair in Prague was the presentation of the first George – or Jiří – Theiner Award. Named after a Czech…

In the early summer of 1938 an unprepared visitor would have found it hard to find a hotel in Prague. Tens of thousands of people from dozens of countries, including…

What does Allen Ginsberg have in common with the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, Turkey’s Nazim Hikmet, and the Czech Nobel Prize winner, Jaroslav Seifert? The answer…

Recent editions of this programme have been rather full of doom and gloom, as we have approached the Second World War in our archives. So this week we look at something a…

Every year in May, ceremonies take place on town and village squares across the Czech Republic to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II. Since the fall of…

In 1938 at the height of the Sudeten crisis, Jan Masaryk was Czechoslovakia’s ambassador in London. He was the son of the country’s first President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk…

In sombre tones the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš announced his resignation on Czechoslovak Radio on October 5 1938. Since becoming president in 1935, he had…