David Vaughan

In this week’s Czech Books we look at what is, amazingly, the first anthology of contemporary Czech poetry to be published in English since the fall of the Berlin Wall…

In the last couple of weeks we have looked at the growing tensions in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1930s, as pressure from Nazi Germany grew. The period…

The years of German occupation and decades of communist rule that followed have given music a very special role in Czech society. Amid censorship and political…

It was exactly seventy years ago this week, at 11 pm on a cold and snowy Christmas Eve in 1937, that Czechoslovak Radio attempted a fascinating radio experiment. A radio…

In this special programme, we offer a taste of Czech Christmas music through the centuries. We’ll be hearing from the 17th century “Christmas Songbook” of Adam Michna z…

We have featured Mark Corner in this programme before. He has translated several well known Czech works from the first half of the twentieth century, including Vladislav…

“Hello, hello! Prague, Czechoslovakia calling. Good evening ladies and gentlemen”: Radio Prague welcomes listeners to its English programmes back in 1937. The tone may be…

At the beginning of this series we heard the voice of the first Czechoslovak President, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. The Masaryk family included several remarkable women, who…

It was the literary headline of the year, when Vaclav Havel’s first play for nearly two decades was published a few weeks ago and we can be every bit as sure that the…

It was an unforgettable moment in the history of Czech sport. In the 49th minute Petr Svoboda scored the winning goal against Russia in the ice hockey final of the 1998…