The Radio 3 Documentary

Matthew Sweet unearths the film-maker Alexander Korda's wartime role as a British agent.

Wild swimming enthusiast Alice Roberts examines the legacy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin.

Drawing on the testimony of many who knew him, Colm Toibin presents an intimate portrait of the brilliant, playful, Pulitzer-winning American poet John Ashbery, who died in 2017. Produced in Cardiff by Steven Rajam and Lyndon Jones

It’s been described as one of the most remarkable collections of minds on the planet. It has a brilliant international faculty, but no students. Its researchers have made some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but it has never had a laboratory. Sally Marlow joins scholars for the start of a new term at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton New Jersey, concei...

Dr Seán Williams takes a first class trip through the enduring contradictions of luxury.

Musician and journalist Katherine Whatley explores the rich and surprising history of jazz in Japan. Surprising because the chaotic individualism of this American art form appears at first to go against the very grain of Japan’s communitarian sprit. More surprising still that, having been banned as ‘enemy music’ during the second world war, jazz music was wholeheartedly embraced in Japan during th...

A succulent & mouth watering portrait of one of the least talked about organs of the body.

Sarah Dillon explores the stories behind how great works of literature were written.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough tells the magical story of the tree that sits at the heart of Christmas day - the pine tree. A tale of power, biological wonder and baubles.

'Fire!!' was a short-lived literary magazine from the Harlem Renaissance published in 1926, created by and for the young black artists of the movement. Featuring poetry, prose, drama and artwork from some of the biggest names of the Harlem Renaissance including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman and Aaron Douglas, the magazine was an explosive attempt to bur...

Amazing travels of the first Englishman in India & a hunt for a lost poetic masterpiece.

Two features by R3 New Generation Thinkers. Dr Simon Beard and Dr Islam Issa

Two Features by R3 New Generation Thinkers Hetta Howes and Eleanor Lybeck.

Author Carlo Gebler has spent nearly three decades working in the Northern Ireland prison system as a teacher of creative writing. He's been in all the prisons there - including the notorious Maze/Long Kesh H-Blocks - and has done everything from basic literacy to high end literature; letters to victims to Open University essays. As many of the prisoners Carlo has worked with in their cells would...

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough enters the forests of our imagination, looking for stories. Alternative realities, holy quests and fairytales hidden among the glories of the Autumn forest. Despite our evolution in the African rainforests, Eleanor wonders whether it is tales from the frozen North that have given us the most potent forests of the imagination, invading our psyche, inhabiting our stories...

Sir Hubert Parry is largely remembered today for a handful of iconic works including Jerusalem, I was Glad, Blest Pair of Sirens, and for writing the hymn tune to Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. But Parry was far more significant than these few works which have remained in the public consciousness. In this centenary year since the composer’s death, Simon Heffer argues for a reevaluation of Parry...

Author Colm Toibin profiles the turbulent and brilliant life of American poet Robert Lowell, once considered the greatest living poet in English. Four decades ago, the American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) died quietly in the back of a New York taxi. In his arms, he clutched a priceless portrait of his third wife, the Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood. Yet Lowell was on his way to see - a...

Actors Jim Broadbent, Toby Jones and Sylvester McCoy join David Bramwell to celebrate Ken

Allan Little looks at arts festivals started in the aftermath of World War Two

Catherine Fletcher explores Monterverdi's pioneering use of female roles and performers

Adam Smith traces the birth and afterlife of Hemingway's explosive short story.

To mark Tony Harrison's 80th birthday, Paul Farley profiles the unique poet. (R)

Jon Gower uncovers the work of the pioneering naturalist RM Lockley, whose work inspired Watership Down, paying tribute to the stunning coastline and island where Lockley worked.

Liliane Lijn explores the work of postwar French artist Yves Klein, famous for patenting ultramarine blue and jumping from a window in the suburbs of Paris. Leap into the Void!

Chris Bowlby travels with Tony Harrison to Prague, to discover how one of Britain's best known poets was shaped by the cultural energy and tragedy of 1960s Czechoslovakia. Harrison reads from his Prague poems in the locations where they were written. And he relives with Czech friends stories of cafes and cartoons, sex and surveillance and the hope and despair of a people fighting Soviet tanks and...