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THANK YOU, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Posted on 23/04/22
April 23rd is Shakespeare’s birthday and International Book Day. What a happy coincidence… Maybe not a coincidence. (This year, it’s also a day of widespread political protest throughout France, but we can leave that for others.) If I had to choose one …
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We Speak the Same Language
A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the upsurge of people learning Ukrainian. The staff writer had posted a request for interviewees on the Ukrainian Language Group I belong to, and his article got me to thinking about language in ways I hadn’t...
A Sober Act of Courage: Remembering Jan Palach
Student photo of Jan Palach Mid-afternoon, 16th January 1969, passers-by near the National Museum at the top of Prague’s principal boulevard see flames shoot up near the museum fountain. A human being is afire. He runs a short way down the boulevard and collapses. A...
Václav Havel, the Velvet Revolution and Filming ‘in Truth’
Seventeenth November is the 31st anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The face of that Revolution in his own country and in the West remains Václav Havel, a complex, elusive thinker, writer, resistant and statesman who continues to fascinate. The most recent...
POLITICAL THEATRE, ILLEGAL THEATRE
Today is the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, which existed as a country for just 74 years. Like other nation-states in the region, it was a creation of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. But there were long-standing tensions between the two peoples which...
PATRON SAINTS, ANCIENT and MODERN
I have been thinking about patron saints, because the feast day of Saint Wenceslaus is today. He ruled Bohemia for fourteen years until he was assassinated by his brother in 935 on his way to mass. There were already stories and legends about his piety during his...
21st August 1968: The Warsaw Pact Invasion… and a Hidden Dimension of the Prague Spring
August 21 has had special meaning for me since 1968. I was a student working a summer job on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It was Wednesday, and in the conference room a radio was broadcasting the morning news. Suddenly it cut to street noise – people shouting, rumbling...
