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Inspired by the hit hybrid pastry the cronut, Lukáš Vašek’s bakery has brought it to the Czech Republic as the crobliha – and is constantly sold out.

Bach Nguyen of Prague firm SatoshiLabs explains various aspects of Bitcoin, the virtual currency that is increasingly visible in the Czech Republic.

Football Club is a new Czech-language quarterly that delivers long-form articles on various aspects of domestic and international soccer culture and history. Inspired by similar titles around Europe such as the UK’s The Blizzard, it was created by Karel Häring, a well-known football writer, and Czech Radio journalist Jan Kaliba. In his introduction to the first edition of Football Club, Häring recalls that when he was at the newspaper Sport the target readers were “factory workers rather than university graduates”. So, I asked him, is the new journal

One attraction for visitors to Prague is the city’s unusually rich history of magic and alchemy. The Czech capital also has more than its fair share of haunted places – around 130 in the Old and New Towns alone, according to American Raymond Johnston. A well-known journalist in Prague for many years, Johnston has now created an interactive map chiefly intended for smartphones that makes it easy to get on the trail of the city’s phantoms and legends. As we sat recently outside the 14th century St. Peter’s Church at Na Poříčí, he explained how the

The Innocence Project is a US-based legal organisation that has succeeded in getting hundreds of wrongly convicted people out of prison. The Irish barrister, teacher and writer David Langwallner, who is now based at Prague’s Anglo-American University, set up an Innocence Project in his native country in 2009 and made headlines for winning a posthumous pardon for Harry Gleeson, an innocent man hanged for murder in 1941. When we spoke Langwallner first gave me some background on his organisation.

For many years Jana Fraňková was the regular interpreter for President Václav Havel when he welcomed foreign visitors and travelled abroad. Fraňková was one of the few Czechs of her generation to graduate from Oxford University and following her return to Prague in the 1970s was harassed by the secret police for translating for Charter 77. She was also involved, she told me at Radio Prague’s studios, with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, a group of Western academics who provided underground support to intellectuals in Czechoslovakia.

The journalist Veronika Bednářová has been closely associated with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for many years. Her main job there is as editor-in-chief of the Festival Daily newspaper, but she also is well-known for moderating press conferences with some of the world’s biggest movie stars. When we sat down just before the 52nd edition got underway, I asked Bednářová when she had gone to Karlovy Vary for the first time.

Professor Igor Lukeš teaches at Boston University and has written extensively on modern Czech history, the Cold War and contemporary developments in Central and Eastern Europe. When we spoke recently the conversation took in everything from his increasingly sympathetic view of Neville Chamberlain to his own arrival in New York in the late 1970s. But I first asked the renowned historian about his early life in communist Czechoslovakia.

The young Prague-born writer Jaroslav Kalfař has received a great deal of attention in the international media for his debut novel Spaceman of Bohemia, which combines elements of science fiction with references to Czech history and mixes absurd humour and moral questions. Kalfař lives in New York and wrote the book in English. When we spoke recently, the author – who has drawn comparisons with several of the greatest modern Czech novelists – was on one of his first visits back to his native city since moving to the US.

This week sees the release of the first episode of Genius, a new National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein that was filmed here in the Czech Republc. The older Einstein is played by Geoffrey Rush, the Oscar-winning Australian actor known for movies such as Shine and The King’s Speech. While Rush was still in Prague he spoke exclusively to Petr Dudek of Czech Radio’s Radiožurnál on a host of subjects – including playing the famous Einstein.