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Prague this week hosted the annual USA and European Union Days conference where several prominent international and Czech figures discussed transatlantic cooperation and the role of both the US and the EU in international affairs. Among the keynote speakers this year was the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak; I sat down with Mr Barak to discuss, among other issues, and the perils of the US approach to the Arab Spring, the recent deal on Iran’s nuclear programme, and why the West should not treat Russia as an enemy.

Welcome to our special extended programme marking the October 28th national holiday in the Czech Republic. Ninety-five years ago today, Czechoslovakia declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, becoming an independent state. The so-called First Republic thus came into being, at first under much celebrated president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and subsequently Edvard Beneš, who would witness the country’s dismemberment in 1938 under the Munich Agreement. Although Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia

When Czechoslovakia’s President-in-exile Edvard Beneš spoke in the English industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent on 6 September 1942, it was a turning point in the propaganda war with Germany. This was three months after the Nazis had destroyed the village of Lidice near Prague; many of the men who were murdered were miners or steel workers and in Britain the massacre led to a wave of solidarity with the victims, most markedly among miners. The “Lidice Shall Live” movement that was born in Stoke-on-Trent became the focus of this solidarity, initiated

Our special broadcast for Saints Cyril and Methodius Day explores a famous musical homage to the two missionaries and their legacy, Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass.

While thousands of Westerners flocked to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Velvet Revolution, Don Sparling experienced those dramatic events at first hand. In the second part of a two-part interview, he discusses, among other things, that intoxicating period and the changes that followed.

Few if any Westerners have been living in this part of the world for as long as Don Sparling. Indeed, the Canadian-born academic came to Czechoslovakia in March 1969, just seven months after the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring movement. He has been here ever since, for the most part living in Brno, where he eventually became head of the English Department at Masaryk University.

It is exactly 90 years since the very first regular radio broadcasts in Czechoslovakia began on 18 May 1923. These were humble beginnings, starting in a borrowed scouts’ tent on the edge of Prague. But within just a few years, radio became central to the lives of millions of Czechoslovaks and over the decades the archives here in the Czech Radio headquarters have become an Aladdin’s Cave of sound, a living audio source for anyone wanting to research into twentieth century Czechoslovak history. For our 90th birthday, we joined forces with a group

Professor Otto Pick was one of nearly 700 Jewish children who escaped the Nazis on a transport to the UK organised by Nicholas Winton, a British diplomat based in Prague. He says he only became aware relatively recently that he was on the now famous “Winton train” and does not know how his family managed to get him on board and save his life.

In this special program we speak to the singer and songwriter Marta Töpferová about her newest album Milokraj, her relationship to her home country and her love of Moravian folk music.

Wherever you are in the Northern Hemisphere, it is likely that sometime around now you are marking one of the dozens of religious or cultural holidays that celebrates the beginning of spring. In this year’s Easter Monday special, we look at the ancient origins some of the peculiar traditions and trappings of the Czech spring celebration.