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Petr Wagner is the front man of Czech Christian punk group Goro, a presenter on Český rozhlas station Radio Wave, and a Hussite preacher based in Čerčany, near Prague. Ahead of Monday’s national holiday in honour of Saint Wenceslas, I met Petr in a sunny Prague park to ask him what he thought the nation’s patron saint meant to Czechs a millennium after his death:

In his final appearance for the club, Vladimír Šmicer scored for Liverpool as they came from 3:0 down to beat AC Milan in the 2005 Champions League final, one of the most dramatic football matches of all time. The Czech player had started what became the game of his career as a substitute, but was sent on after half an hour when a team-mate got injured. Looking back over four years later, Šmicer remembers his reaction when Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez told him to get ready.

The Czech soccer player Vladimír Šmicer has enjoyed a very successful career, winning league titles in the Czech Republic and France, and a number of trophies with one of the world’s biggest clubs, Liverpool. The attacking midfielder, who is now 36, was also part of the Czech team that surprised many by reaching the final of the 1996 European Championship. I met Vladimír Šmicer at the stadium of Slavia Prague, the club where his career began in the early 1990s.

The usual station announcements boom out of the loudspeakers at London’s Liverpool Street Station on Friday but, if you listen hard enough, you can hear some of the tens of extra policemen drafted on special duty, and the hiss of a steam engine that’s just arrived at platform 10. The Winton Train set out from Prague on September 1, transporting some of the Czech and German Jewish children saved from the Holocaust by Sir Nicholas Winton back along the route they traveled to safety in 1939. On Friday, the train arrived in London, and was greeted

This year, as we mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism, we are reminded how much of twentieth century history has passed through the Czech capital. The focus of much that has happened in Prague over the last hundred years has been Wenceslas Square, tree-lined and nearly a kilometre long, right at the heart of the city, and with the bronze statue of the Czech patron, Saint Wenceslas, standing guard at the top of the square. One person who has lived on Wenceslas Square nearly all her life is Věra Kölbelová. From her unique vantage point

The great American artist, illustrator and writer Robert Crumb has been described as the father of underground comics. His wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb is also a successful cartoonist, known for her autobiographical stories. I met the Crumbs at the start of this year’s Prague Writers’ Festival, where they are among the special guests. Assuming that when they started out cartooning would not have been regarded as literature, when did their art form begin to win respect?

Lukáš Přibyl’s series of documentaries, ‘Forgotten Transports’, depicts a lesser-known side of the Holocaust, played out in locations a lot less notorious than Belsen or Auschwitz. The films have been subject to an overwhelming amount of critical acclaim ever since the final installment, ‘Forgotten Transports to Poland’ was premiered in March this year. Just before Lukáš Přibyl set off to Paris to promote the cycle there, I asked him to tell me a bit about the project:

The Romanies, or Roma, are the Czech Republic’s biggest minority. The relations between Roma and the majority population have long been troubled but recently took a turn for the worse. The community is outraged by the rise in extremist and neo-Nazi movements. For the first time ever, Romany NGOs are organizing a nationwide protest against extremism that will take place on Sunday.

In less than two months’ time, between June 4 and June 7, the European Union will be holding the biggest trans-national election in history. Citizens of the 27 member states will be voting to choose the 736 members of the European Parliament. One of the features of the election is that citizens of one member state who live abroad are entitled to vote in their country of residence, if that country is also an EU member. That means that if you are a citizen of any EU country and live legally in the Czech Republic, you can vote for candidates standing

This year’s Easter has been very special for Christians in the Czech Republic as, for the first time in 30 years, they could read the Bible in a new translation. Entitled the Bible – a 21st century translation, it presents all Biblical texts in modern, contemporary Czech, making the scriptures accessible to all generations. The new translation was officially launched on Thursday in Prague’s Bethlehem Chapel.