One on One | All stories

Not long after moving to Prague at the start of 1991, Englishman Richard Drury began working as a curator at the Central Bohemian Gallery, previously known as the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, on Husová St. He has been there ever since. Remarkably for a foreigner, he is also chairman of one section of the venerable Czech cultural organisation Umělecká beseda. When we met, I asked Drury if it had been hard to find a place in Prague’s art world.

This autumn, the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival will celebrate 10 years of showing gay and lesbian-themed films to the Czechs. The festival is held between October 23 and November 8 in Brno, Prague and several other cities around the country, under the motto “The Third World War of the Sexes”. In this edition of One on One, our guest is the festival’s director Aleš Rumpel who explains what the main focus of this year’s Mezipatra is.

The model Pattie Boyd was the inspirational force behind two of the greatest modern musicians, “quiet Beatle” George Harrison and the legendary Eric Clapton. Both her former husbands – also very close friends – immortalised her in some of their most famous songs and popular ballads. Now on display in Prague’s Old Town is a collection of Pattie’s private photographs from the inside of that triangular love story, the unintended moral of which is that behind every great man – or two - is a great woman. “Layla” herself was in Prague to share her memories

This week’s guest in One on One is Czech golf pro Alan Babický. A skilled businessman but also former dancer, choreographer and downhill skier, Babický picked up the sport of golf at the fairly late age of 28. But within ten years he had built up a solid reputation, even winning the World Golfers’ Championship in Thailand in 2004 – one of the most prestigious competitions for amateur players. Recently I caught up with Alan Babický to discuss his career; the first thing I asked was how much he knew about golf the first time picked up a club 15 years

Karel Čapek is one of the few Czech writers whose work has transcended borders. Although he died prematurely, aged 48, during the dire year of 1938, in the course of his short lifetime he wrote over 20 prosaic works as well as several plays and travel books. Many of these have been translated into English – and our guest in this edition of One on One is Norma Comrada, an American who translated several of Čapek’s collections of short stories, and his 1938 play The Mother. I met Ms Comrada at a most appropriate venue – Karel Čapek’s study on the

It’s pretty fair to say that anybody in the Czech Republic who knows anything about astronomy has learned at least some of it from Dr. Jiří Grygar. Something of a Czech Carl Sagan, Dr. Grygar has been a frequent personality of Czech and Slovak television screens since his popular programme “Windows Wide Open to Space” in the late 1970’s. He was the chairman of the Czech Astronomical Society and is one of the founding members of the Czech club of sceptics, Sisyfos, which battles pseudoscience and charlatanism in the Czech media. I met Dr. Grygar

Laura Baranik is one of the Czech Republic’s best known restaurant reviewers, writing a regular column in the Saturday edition of the newspaper Lidové noviny, as well as running her own blog, The Prague Spoon. During her short career, the 25-year-old has developed a reputation for demanding high standards, and earned the enmity of some restaurateurs, who are perhaps unused to such exacting criticism.

My guest in One on One today has been described as a ‘young Czech Matthew Barney’ and a ‘rising star’ on the London art scene. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art two years ago, Tereza Bušková has exhibited in some of the capital’s highest-profile spaces such as Gallery 176, and Gallery One One One. Bušková’s screen-prints and films draw heavily upon her Czech origins. In October, her project ‘The Spring Equinox’ will be exhibited in London alongside the work of compatriots Kateřina Šedá and Josef Bolf. On a recent visit back to Prague,

Sculptor Pavel Opočenský has seen many twists and turns in his life. After signing Charter 77, he left for Germany to eventually settle in New York. When he came back after the fall of communism in 1990, he got involved in an incident in which he killed a skinhead in self defence. The trial took four and a half years before he was cleared of criminal charges. In the meantime, Pavel Opočenský became a respected sculptor – but in 2003, he was sentenced to three years in jail for sex with minors.

My guest today in One on One is concert pianist and director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra Jan Simon. Simon has studied with some of the great pianists including compatriot Ivan Moravec in Prague and the Uruguayan-born Homero Francesch in Zurich. He also trained in Berlin before becoming the youngest ever soloist in residence of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1994. When I met him to bask in the sun on his balcony, Jan Simon started by telling me about his musical family background: