The Radio 3 Documentary

Author and journalist Tarek Osman returns to the Middle East to explore how the apparently unassuming establishment of the Café has served as a vibrant hub of change in the political tsunamis that have swept - and are still sweeping - through the region.

As part of Wagner 200, Stephen Johnson explores the worlds of Wagner's heroes, from Norse myths to his own Tannhauser, Siegfried and Parsifal. He charts how Wagner himself became a national hero.

Writer Anthony Sattin visits Jan Morris's Welsh home on the 60th anniversary of the ascent of Everest to talk about her role in the story and other tales to be gleaned about her life from the objects in her home (including a gravestone and a posthumous book awaiting publication!). Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

Renzo Piano is the architect behind the tallest building in Western Europe, The Shard at London Bridge. He grew up wanting to be a musician, and Tom Service discovers how he sees the basic elements of music as fundamental to his way of thinking about his buildings. His landmark buildings include cultural centres and concert halls around the world. Tom visits IRCAM in Paris, and the Parco della mus...

The Reverend Richard Coles visits Lincoln Cathedral, the focus of Medieval pilgrimage, to begin the last of his series exploring contemporary and historical ideas about sin. Having looked at the central place Temptation still has for many in both religious and secular societies the attention now swings to methods of redemption, purification and the goodness that is defined only by its counter to t...

In this first of three programmes, Richard explores what exactly is meant by sin, and its origins in man's earliest ethical structures.

The Reverand Richard Coles explores notions of temptation and its part in contemporary and ancient societies.

Throughout our cultural history, tears have been intimately connected with the arts, whether as inspiration or response. Thomas Dixon is director of the UK's first Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University London. In this programme he explores the history of weeping as an aesthetic response to works of art: paintings, writing, music, theatre and film. What it is about works o...

Will Self broadcasts an imaginary archive of modernist radio and discusses the influence of modernism today. In a secret laboratory underneath the BBC archive there is a small room containing a special machine. It's a BBC prototype 'RP-1 Ethermatic remitter'. An experimental machine designed to retrieve ('remit') past radio signals back out of the air. Although partially successful during field tr...

Sunday Feature: Alexandra Harris presents a cultural history of the cold. With the help of writers including Simon Armitage, A.S. Byatt, Katherine Swift and Adam Gopnik Alex looks at the way our literature began with work mesmerised by the beauty and horror of cold. In Yorkshire Simon Armitage discusses Sir Gawain and the Green Knight imagining the Pennines crossed by Gawain, hung with icicles on...

In 1812 Napoleon led his army to Moscow. In War and Peace Tolstoy gave his account of the great invasion, the battle of Borodino, and the subsequent burning of Moscow. Rosamund Bartlett, translator of Russian novels and biographer of Tolstoy investigates the truth and the fiction of one of the most famous novels of all time. Tolstoy believed that Napoleon and the Russian commander Kutuzov were no...

Barry Cunliffe on the king whom history has often held responsible for inviting in the first Anglo-Saxons. First in a series of portraits of thirty ground-breaking Anglo-Saxon men and women.

Californian poetry found fame with The Beats in the 1950s. Dana Gioia reveals developments since - Language, ecological, Hispanic poetry - and before, back to the Gold Rush.

Sunday Feature: Michael Goldfarb explores the development and enduring appeal of the piano across social and geographic divides.

Sunday Feature: Jacquetta Hawkes and The Personal Past. Christine Finn excavates clues in the personal and public life of once acclaimed archaeologist and writer, Jacquetta Hawkes, to explain why she has faded from public memory.

The American Civil War: Blockade Runners and Black Minstrels. What did Britain do in the American Civil War? Louise Welsh investigates blockade running, blackface minstrelsy, spy-wars and abolitionists, with the Clyde shipyards as her focus.

The American Civil War: Dividing Lines. Historian Adam Smith visits contemporary America to trace how the dividing lines of the Civil War are still visible beneath US politics 150 years on.

The American Civil War: The War of the North. Dr Adam Smith travels from Lincoln's home town to Washington DC and the battlefields of Virginia as he asks why the North fought and what it won.

The American Civil War: The War of the South. Dr Adam Smith travels to Richmond, the heart of the Southern Confederacy, to uncover the dramatic contradictions at the South's heart and the war it waged.

Great British Ideas:J.A. Hobson, Lenin and Anti-Imperialism. Historian Tristram Hunt traces how an anti-imperialist book by a liberal English journalist had a surprising impact on Lenin - in exile, and even after he seized power in Moscow.

Great British Ideas: Young England and Young Ireland. Tristram Hunt traces the curious influence of the romantic 'Young England' movement, led by Benjamin Disraeli in the 1840s, on 'Young Ireland', which sought Irish freedom.

Great British Ideas: Robert Malthus. Historian Tristram Hunt traces how the ideas of the 18th century British economist Robert Malthus wreaked havoc in 19th century India, yet were later adopted by Indians themselves.

Sunday Feature: The Other Dickens. Laurence Scott explores the work and the life of Victorian bad boy writer and contemporary of Dickens, George WM Reynolds, whose novels painted Victorian London's seamiest sides

Sunday Feature: Crowd Psychology. From the summer riots last year to the Olympics 2012, geneticist Steve Jones investigates crowd behaviour and finds that modern science disputes myths of mad mobs out of control.

Sunday Feature: Malvinas Madness. Andrew Graham Yooll, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, examines Argentine identity and dreams bound in their longing for the Malvinas or Falkland Islands.