Egon Bondy was the “superstar” of the Czechoslovak musical underground in the 1970s and his novel Unsound Siblings was inspired by his cooperation with the legendary Plastic People of the Universe. It has been published for the first time in an English translation by Mark Corner and I was given the enjoyable task of writing the afterword for a book that in many ways was decades ahead of its time.

I was recently invited to write an afterword to the first English translation of one of the classics of Czech writing from the late 1960s. It is a brilliant book and its author, Jan Procházka, is a much neglected Czech writer.

It is 1938 and Hitler is spreading his poison through Central Europe. With the world’s press corps descending on Prague, a young man from London arrives in the city as an interpreter. His world is shaken as he witnesses dramatic and unsettling events. Germany sucks Austria and then Czechoslovakia into its orbit. As manipulation and distortion become normal, our narrator feels his grip on reality slip away. His job is to translate, yet he finds himself lost for words. Truth will prevail, but whose truth will it be?

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition No Night So Dark.

When I visited Colin Wels in Oxford in 2017, he showed me a little book, written and illustrated by his father and uncle as teenagers in Prague in 1938. As I read the manuscript, made up of family conversations and vividly illustrated by the 13-year-old Martin, I was drawn into their world, a world that was to disappear with World War Two and the Holocaust. I worked with the publishers Triáda to bring out a trilingual facsimile edition in Czech, German and English.

Battle for the Airwaves looks at the Munich crisis as it played out on the radio stations of Czechoslovakia, Germany, Britain and the United States. Drawing on the extensive and long-forgotten archives of Czech Radio, as well as archives in Germany, Britain and the US, David Vaughan reveals radio’s key role in the run-up to the Munich Agreement and beyond.

An essay on the legacy of the Lidice massacre of 1942, in Place (eds. Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Thames and Hudson, London 2005)