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The Czech government needs to invest hundreds of billions of crowns to shore up the economy, with the crucial auto industry particularly vulnerable. Measures being taken now will alleviate the unemployment that will inevitably follow the coronavirus crisis. And the weak crown is of no benefit to exporters if they aren’t producing anything. So says the vice president of the Czech Confederation of Industry, Radek Špicar, who I spoke to late last week.

In his new book Slepé skvrny (Blind Spots), sociologist Daniel Prokop offers illuminating perspectives on various aspects of today’s Czech Republic. This makes the Charles University academic the perfect person with whom to discuss issues such as the connections between pay level and political outlook and between social mobility and education – and how the coronavirus crisis is likely to affect the country’s worst off. But our conversation begins with Czech populism.

Miřenka Čechová is an internationally acclaimed performer, director and choreographer known for combining dance and physical theatre. In her recently published autobiographical novel Baletky (Ballet Dancers) Čechová draws on her years as a pre-teen and teenage student at Prague’s Dance Conservatory, detailing extreme physical demands and constant psychological pressure. Nevertheless, the 38-year-old says she did not intend the book – which also paints a vivid portrait of ‘90s Prague – as a “My Ballet Hell” style misery memoir. When we spoke, I first asked

Writer and former dissident Eda Kriseová worked closely with Václav Havel during his first few years as president. She headed Prague Castle’s Complaints and Pardons Department, then inundated with letters from Czechs who felt for the first time in decades that they could appeal to somebody in authority. Kriseová, who wrote the only authorised biography of Havel, even gave interviews as a kind of stand-in for the much in-demand democracy leader.

When Eda Kriseová was barred from journalism after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion she chose an unlikely escape from the grim reality of that time: voluntary work at an isolated mental hospital. She also wrote in samizdat, which led to her gradually becoming part of Czechoslovakia’s anti-Communist dissent. As we will hear, Kriseová – whose husband is filmmaker Josef Platz – found novel ways to resist secret police pressure. But the first part of this two-part interview begins with the author’s early days.

No fewer than 23,000 fans of sci-fi, fantasy and horror attended the first ever Prague Comic-Con at the weekend. And the biggest guest at the inaugural edition was Hollywood actor Ron Perlman, who has appeared in superhero movies such as Hellboy and Blade II, both of which were shot right here in Prague, a city he avowedly adores.

Philosopher and one-time dissident Jan Sokol is perhaps best-known among the Czech public as a failed presidential candidate, having missed out to Václav Klaus in the final round of voting in 2003, the last time the country’s head of state was chosen by legislators. Professor Sokol has known the current, directly elected president since before 1989 – and offers sharp criticism of Miloš Zeman in this the second half of a two-part interview. But first we discuss the period when, after the fall of communism, he was finally allowed to pursue an academic

Philosopher Jan Sokol was an MP in the early 1990s, served as Czech education minister and lost in the final round of voting for president in 2003. Barred from studying under the Communists, Professor Sokol came to philosophy via his father-in-law Jan Patočka, an early signatory of Charter 77. In the first part of a two-part interview, he discusses Patočka’s death, the achievements of Charter 77 – which he also signed – and the Velvet Revolution. But our conversation began with Jan Sokol’s family background and his own beginnings.

Czech journalist Jana Ciglerová recently published the book Americký Deník (American Diary), compiling a series of columns she wrote during a stay in Florida between late 2016 and last summer. When she came to our studios, the conversation took in US and Czech attitudes to parenting, education and friendship, as well as Ciglerová’s experience of reporting from Trump’s America. But I first asked her what had been the hardest single thing to get used to in the US.

One of the most compelling and stylish Czech films of 2019 was A Certain Kind of Silence, the feature debut from Michal Hogenauer. The largely English-language work depicts a Czech girl who becomes an au pair in an unnamed Northern European state only to discover her host family are members of a sinister sect. When we spoke, the conversation took in the challenges of shooting abroad and the ways in which directors can pander to festival programmers. But I first asked Hogenauer about the inspiration for the story in A Certain Kind of Silence.