One on One | All stories

In this week’s edition of One on One we talk to the artist, sculptor, painter, musician and actor Jaroslav Róna. In the 1980s, he was one of the founders of the art group Tvrdohlaví, or The Stubborn but today, he is perhaps best known as the author of the Franz Kafka Monument in Prague’s Old Town. I talked to Jaroslav Róna in his studio and asked him was why he decided to base the highly acclaimed Kafka memorial on his short story, Description of One Struggle.

Czech bluegrass has a long tradition going back to the 1960s but it took several more decades before it was acknowledged in the land of its origin, the United States. Our guest in this edition of One on One is Robert Křesťan, the banjoist, lead singer and the founder of a bluegrass legend, the band Druhá Tráva, formed in the early 1990s. Their latest album Dylanovky, features songs by Bob Dylan translated into Czech by Robert Křesťan, and he and his band set the scene before the public speech of the US President, Barack Obama at Prague Castle earlier

Pre-war Prague with its multi-national and multi-cultural environment has inspired many scholars and writers who explore the life of Czechs, Germans and Jews in the city of a hundred spires before it was swept away by the two totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Our guest in this edition of One on One is Professor Peter Demetz, the author of Prague in Black and Gold, Stage: Prague, and other works. Mr Demetz was born in Prague in the 1920s to a German and Jewish family but left the country after the communist takeover of 1948 and later became

Igor Klimeš recently came home after spending a year as the deputy leader of the civilian part of the first Czech Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in war-torn Afghanistan. As a project manager, he oversaw a raft of activities, including the rebuilding of schools and hospitals and the construction of a dam. When we met in Prague, I asked Igor if he had worked on any projects in Afghanistan of which he was particularly proud.

For four decades, the countries trapped behind the Iron Curtain attracted only a few travellers from the West. Our guest in this week’s edition of One on One is the American writer, scholar and photographer Ruth Ellen Gruber, whose reporting career brought her to the communist block in the 1970s. She spent time in Belgrade and Warsaw, among other places, and after the fall of communism, she stayed in Europe and became a leading scholar on eastern European Jewish heritage – and the region’s country music.

Nora Fridrichová is one of the Czech Republic’s leading broadcast journalists. On Czech Television, she is the host of her own news program, 168 Hours. When I met her recently in a Czech TV studio, we talked about her bold reporting style, love of dark humor, and future career goals. But first, Nora Fridrichová discussed how her show has changed and evolved in the three years it has been running.

My guest for today’s One on One is violin virtuoso Václav Hudeček. Originally a child prodigy, Hudeček played London’s Royal Albert Hall when just fifteen years of age. In the 1960s, Hudeček became something of a violin-playing sex-symbol, selling out stadiums all over Czechoslovakia. In more recent years, he has set up a summer violin academy to encourage young talent in Luhačovice. He is currently touring the world as part of the Czech EU presidency, presenting Czech music and culture abroad. When I met him recently, I asked him how he got involved

Gordon Lovitt has an unusual position in that he is an Englishman who is director of programming at one of the Czech Republic’s four main TV channels, the commercial station Prima. A decade ago he held the same post at state broadcaster Czech Television. And before that he was a professional actor; indeed, a visit to Zlín (or Gottwaldov as it was in those communist times) with a student drama group in the 1980s was Gordon Lovitt’s first experience of the country he now calls home.

Ivo Anderle operates Prague’s two leading arthouse cinemas, Aero, in the Žižkov district of the city, and Světozor, a few metres from Wenceslas Square. In recent years he has entered the distribution business with Aerofilms, whose biggest success to date has been the documentary Citizen Havel, recently voted best Czech film of the last two decades by a poll of industry figures in Reflex magazine.

Czechs are reputed to be one of Europe’s most atheist nations. Yet in the course of its history, the nation has produced many outstanding religious thinkers, philosophers, writers and other personalities who left their mark on the development of theology and religion. In this edition of One on One, we talk to one of the country’s leading Catholic intellectuals, Martin C. Putna, a literary historian, specializing in Czech Catholic literature, who has recently become the head of the Václav Havel library. He recently hosted a popular TV show which