Richard Fidler
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Richard Fidler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Wielding their truncheons, hammering people with it, hitting people.
People are being picked up and thrown through the air.
A nice boy called Martin Schmidt had been killed.
That was the body people saw being dragged off the street.
I've often called it a liminal city because you often feel like you're on the verge of some other world.
There's something otherworldly about the place, particularly in the middle of winter, very late at night.
This is Richard Feidler.
I'm one of the presenters of Conversations on ABC Radio, enormously popular podcast.
Perhaps you've heard of it.
And I'm also the author of several history books, including a book called The Golden Maze, which is a history of the city of Prague.
The city's about 1,200 years, 1,300 years old.
It grew up as this medieval capital in the early phases of the Holy Roman Empire.
And as a result, its inner core is pretty much very medieval.
Nothing's at right angles.
Everything twists and turns.
It's as an Australian or as an American or a Canadian coming to such a place when we live in big modern cities, there's this odd feeling of homecoming because you can't quite put your finger on until you realise that Prague is that city we have in our childhood imaginations from the Grimm's Fairy Tales where we're given as children.
So there's this feeling of odd familiarity in these strange twisty turny streets.
And, you know, famously, it's the city where Franz Kafka wrote his story Metamorphosis, where his main character transmutes into a human cockroach.
It's that kind of a place, Mark.
And so there was a kind of glorious, slightly dingy romanticism.
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