The Radio 3 Documentary

Emma Smith on how coverage of gender in the arts might help us understand today's debate

Might explorations of gender in great art of the past help illuminate today's issues?

Once upon a time, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough woke up in the summer forest.

David Attenborough reveals a side of himself that nobody knows, as a collector of music from all over the world. We hear the stories that surround it, and the music itself. One of David Attenborough's first projects was 'Alan Lomax - Song Hunter', a television series he produced in 1953-4. The famous collector of the blues and folk music of America gathered traditional musicians from all over Brit...

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two today through film.

Exploring different aspects of history, science, philosophy and the arts.

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two through movies.

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two today through film.

In this Sunday Feature, historian Chris Harding travels from Tokyo to the deep countryside of Japan's north east to tell the alternative story of the country, looking at how, throughout their history, Japanese people have used ghosts and ghost stories to make sense of themselves and their place in the world. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, taxi drivers in the area repor...

Imagine where we’d be without Shakespeare’s plays. It’s difficult to contemplate now. But it was thanks to another man that many of them were brought to life. Today, Richard Burbage is a not a household name. But he should be. He’s the man for whom many of the great Shakespearean roles were created. One of the founding members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, playing at the newly built Globe in 1599...

Paul Morley asks "Can there be too many artists in the world?"

There were many real blind, black bluesman, scraping a living in the Deep South a hundred years ago. From Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson on opposite street corners in Dallas to Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller in Georgia and the Carolinas, the early 20th century saw blind bluesmen playing everything from the lewd, raw blues of the juke joint to the God-fearing spirituals beloved of...

Acclaimed actor Simon Russell Beale is fascinated by the concerto and how the role of the soloist has evolved from baroque times to now. In this Sunday Feature (exploring the theme of this year's Free Thinking Festival - The One and the Many), Simon explores the complex dynamics between the soloist and orchestra, drawing parallels between the world of the concerto and that of the stage. He asks wh...

Sarah Dillon discovers the story behind the writing of R.L. Stevenson's horror classic

Robert Worby on how post-war German radio and new music were conscripted to fight the cultural cold war, juggling political, economic and cultural forces outside of their control.

In 1933 Franz Werfel's epic novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was published to huge acclaim. Werfel was then at the height of his powers, an internationally known author. He told the story of Armenian villagers who, in 1915, resist deportation & annihilation by Turkish forces on the holy mountain of Musa Dagh led by an Armenian émigré who has returned to his ancestral home at this most fatef...

Alexander the Great's Tomb was famous and then it disappeared. Classical historian Edmund Richardson has spent the last few years following in the Macedonian's wake and admits to a growing obsession with the mystery of the missing corpse and its final resting place. Join him as he goes in search of those who claim to have found the conqueror's last remains, peers into a legend-filled sarcophagus s...

Ian Sansom attempts to resurrect the spirit of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky

How do Russia's latest cultural émigrés feel about leaving their homeland? In Russia, culture is increasingly on the front line - many writers, theatre directors and academics feel stifled or under attack. Lucy Ash hears from those who have wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave. For some, working abroad opens up space to think, while for others, the grief of obscurity can be all-encompassi...

Dr Louisa Egbunike, lecturer in English at City University London, is interested in the shifting frame of Afrofuturism. The term was originally coined in 1993 to bracket together work by African-American writers, artists and musicians who were dealing with science-fiction and speculative themes. However it has only recently been suggested that work by creatives living in Africa and those who are p...

Opera Historian Dr Alexandra Wilson dons her cloche hat and steps into the shoes of a flapper for a journey back to 1920s London. Jazz was the new fad imported for America, dance clubs were taking the city by storm and cinemas were popping up on every corner. But what was the place of opera in this new entertainment world? Based on new research, this feature will guide listeners around the heady o...

John Tusa revisits the provincial German towns where as a 19-year-old national serviceman he first discovered opera in 1955 and finds out why, 62 years on, it’s still thriving there. Back then, he was based in the centre of the country, at the garrison in Celle. None of his fellow officers seemed to think it at all unusual when John vanished off from time to time to spend an evening in nearby Hano...

When Dana Gioia was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2015 he was invited to read in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. But Gioia believes the role is to encourage poetry throughout the state. He has a mission: to visit every county in the state of California. There are 58, stretching from Del Norte 1,000 miles south to Imperial, bordering Mexico; from the Sierra mountains and redwo...

Adam Smith traces Ernest Hemingway’s brutal, brilliant short story - from its birth in gangster-era Chicago, through its Hollywood afterlife as a noir classic, to its strange status as Ronald Reagan’s last movie. Ernest Hemingway wrote his short story ‘The Killers’ in 1926. Two hitmen enter a small-town lunch-room. They have come to kill an ex-boxer who has double-crossed someone. The boxer is war...

The Edinburgh Festival was founded 70 years ago in the aftermath of World War Two. 1947 was a year of shortages and rationing, and the idea of starting an arts festival in Scotland's capital city must have seemed highly ambitious. Yet with the support of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Rudolf Bing, the general manager of Glydenbourne Festival Opera, undertook the challenge. It was to prove an inter...