Letter from Prague | All stories

"Young people don't read much these days," is a phrase one hears quite often. "They only watch television, surf the internet and refuse to read anything longer than an SMS message." One would easily believe that, especially if one judges the younger generation by those people who get the most media coverage, such as young celebrities or the protagonists of TV reality shows. Also, frankly, how many books have I myself read from cover to cover in the last year?

Radio Prague has lost a good friend. A renaissance woman with hugely diverse talents, Jaroslava Moserova was not just a doctor - one of the country's top burns specialists - but also a highly respected literary translator and writer, and an accomplished diplomat and politician. Since the fall of communism she had been ambassador to Australia, a prominent member of the Czech Senate and president of the UNESCO General Conference. Her translations of English literature, most famously the novels of Dick Francis, are highly acclaimed. Last week she

The Czech Statistical Office presented us with optimistic news on Thursday and the Czech papers were full of it. The number of children being born in the Czech Republic per year is on the rise. Last year, they totalled 102,211; that's 4,500 more than the year before and the highest number in over a decade.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow - is a wonderful 1940s song, most often played at Christmas. But, last week here in Prague I once again popped it onto the CD player. In fact, I pulled out all the Christmas and holiday carols, figuring 'why not'? I wonder if you can guess the reason.

OK, so some of the jokes about women having a poor sense of direction may be grounded. At least in my case. When I'm sitting next to the driver with a map on my lap you can be fairly certain that I will miss pointing out a vital turning or point it out a few kilometres further down the road. So the news that the world's leading cartographers were meeting in the town of Cesky Krumlov last weekend to debate whether the days of the printed map are numbered gave me a glimmer of hope that I would soon be replaced by a superior satellite navigation

A regular morning journey to work. The metro train arrives just as I step onto the platform at Hradcanska station, an unusual stroke of good luck. On arrival at Museum, my stop, I'm even fairly early. But little do I know that that's about to change. All goes as normal, until I reach the lifts at the end of the platform which take passengers to street level. I and six or seven other Prague commuters step in and are promptly baffled as the lift emits a strange screech and tells us we've reached 5 floors below ground level...

The renovation of the back corner of Prague's main train station, which you pass as you take the tram from the station up towards Zizkov, is quite an impressive job which no doubt cost millions of crowns. Depressingly soon after the work was completed, graffiti started appearing on the huge concrete walls. One of them reads "we don't want clean city".

Prague is a city where history stares at you at every turn. As I sit at the desk typing in my friend's apartment where I'm staying until I find a place of my own, my gaze out the window meets a 1930s block of flats in Klimentska Street. There is nothing outwardly special about the building—in fact, it looks rather shabby these days. If I look directly across the street, my eyes meet a second-floor apartment where the facade is peeling around the windows and the curtains are usually drawn. Sometimes the lights are on. I'm curious about who lives

Magic, mysterious or surreal: many have attributed these qualities to Prague, notably the Italian author Angelo Maria Ripellino, who devotes a whole book to the enigmas of the city. A sense of the unreal seems to be as much part of the Czech capital's identity as spiky medieval buildings or highly quirky metro station designs.

Winter in Prague has all sorts of charms: snow-dusted roofs in the Minor Town, an almost-magical carpet of the white stuff covering the ancient Charles Bridge that takes you across the river to the Old Town, and I can't forget the mulled wine sold on nearly every street-corner. When the cold-spell arrived from the east with added gusto a couple of weeks ago, even the Vltava River froze, creating a beautiful outdoor ice-rink underneath Vysehrad, the original seat of Czech kings. If the setting sounds like something out of a fairytale, it could have