David Vaughan

While the split of Czechoslovakia happened quietly and almost unnoticed, the situation in Yugoslavia could hardly have been more different. There had always been close…

The 78-year-old novelist, Ivan Klíma, is one of the best known and most widely translated of all Czech writers, with novels like “Love and Garbage”, “Judge on Trial” or “…

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…

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…

A couple of years ago in this programme we spoke to the young Czech novelist Petra Hůlová about her epic novel of life in contemporary Mongolia, “Paměť mojí babičce“ –…

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…

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…

Unlike most of our guests in Czech Books, Tomáš Sedláček is an economist, and an influential one at that. He is chief economic strategist for one of the major Czech banks…