Playwright, essayist, former dissident and latterly President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel also finds time to hobnob with rock celebrities like Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Currently recovering from a lung cancer operation, he is as popular as ever with the Czech public, who recently gave him an approval rating of 80 per cent. Born in Prague on 5 October 1936, Havel turned to the theatre in the late 1950s after being refused a place at the National Film School on ideological grounds. He worked as a lighting technician at the Divadlo Na Zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade) and began writing plays. His works were banned after the Soviet invasion and, as a leading dissident, he was a founder member of the human rights movement, Charter 77. Imprisoned several times, he returned to prominence during the Velvet Revolution and was elected president in December 1989. Shortly after leaving hospital, in January 1997, the president announced that he was marrying the well-known Czech actress, Dagmar Veskrnova, less than a year after the death of his first wife, Olga.

One of the 20th century's most influential writers, Franz Kafka was virtually unknown when he died of tuberculosis in 1924 aged 41. Born at U Radnice 5 in 1883, he lived at some 15 addresses in the city, mostly around Old Town Square, where his father owned a haberdasher's shop (Staroměstské náměstí 8). Kafka went to school at the German Gymnasium in the Kinsky Palace before receiving a doctorate in law from the Karolinum in 1906. During his student years he wrote in his spare time. His gathering obsession with bureaucratic oppression probably derives from his work as an insurance clerk. In the words of a friend, Johnnes Urzidil, Prague is 'everywhere in Kafka's work, in tiny splinters' - most famously in his short story, Description of a Struggle, and the nightmarish novel, The Castle, for which the prototype is clearly Pražský hrad.