Sunday Feature: Left-Handed Liberty
Amidst the 800 year celebrations for Magna Carta, Andrew Dickson hears about one of the more provocative theatrical attempts to commemorate the Charter from fifty years ago.
May 31, 2015•45 min
The Radio 3 Documentary
In-depth documentaries which explore a different aspect of history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature. The Sunday Feature is broadcast every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.
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Episodes
John Berger - About Song and Laughter
Sukhdev Sandhu introduces a rare radio-minded feature by the celebrated critic, novelist and thinker John Berger. Now in his ninth decade, Berger talks about the songs in his life and about Charlie Chaplin's radical power. Featuring Katya Berger and the music of Woody Guthrie, Cesaria Evora and Yasmin Hamdam among others. Producer: Tim Dee
May 05, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: In Their Own Write: Notes from the Congress of Vienna
Using diaries and memoirs Michael Goldfarb tells the story of the Congress of Vienna and how it still affects us 200 years later: diplomacy, Beethoven and sex... lots of sex.
Apr 26, 2015•43 min
Sunday Feature: A Secret Life: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness
The leading German writer Uwe Johnson lived in Sheerness from 1974 until his death in 1984. Patrick Wright tries to find out why he chose what he called this 'much maligned' town.
Apr 19, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature Doing Goya Justice The Curators Story
Xavier Bray is a curator on a nail-biting journey to put together the greatest exhibition of portraits by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, which opens at the National Gallery later this year
Apr 15, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Memoirs of the Spacewomen
Matthew Sweet delves into the science fiction futures of Naomi Mitchison, Rose Macaulay and Margot Bennett. With music specially composed by The Vile Electrodes.
Apr 05, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: From Convent to Concert Hall
Dr Kate Kennedy appraises four female string players from different eras and locations, who were all pioneering in their own lifetimes. For International Women's Day 2015
Mar 10, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: The Day of the Locust
Adam Smith unearths the roots of Nathanael West's great 1938 Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust, and tests its prophecy of fascist violence in America against postwar history.
Feb 22, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Cuba Clasica
Andrew McGregor visits Havana to investigate Cuba's classical music scene today.
Feb 16, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Eric Ravilious: Chalk & Ice
Eric Ravilious is considered one of the best watercolourists of the twentieth century. Alexandra Harris explores the life of work of this elusive man and his art.
Feb 09, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Palace of Shame
It's a story of loot, revenge and devastated beauty that looms over British-Chinese relations. Chris Bowlby uncovers the fate of the imperial summer palace in Beijing.
Feb 01, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Beautiful Death
Stephen Johnson connects Mahler's beliefs about death to Viennese funeral customs, and particularly the idea of 'beautiful death' which was pervasive in Mahler's Vienna.
Jan 25, 2015•44 min
Andy Warhol's Factory Friends
Candy Darling and Edie Sedgwick are now the stuff of legend, but many of those with first-hand experience of Warhol's Factory live on. Paul Morley hears tales to amaze and inspire.
Jan 19, 2015•44 min
Sunday Feature: Thom Gunn - Appropriate Measures
Author Colm Tóibín profiles the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn, self-professed lover of "loud music, bars and boisterous men", whose tightly-wrought poetry imposed control and order upon his hedonistic lifestyle.
Jan 04, 2015•44 min
Matthew Sweet's Palace of Great War Varieties
Matthew is joined by historians and performers to explore World War 1 popular culture - from music hall to movies, theatre to night clubs and drugs. Recorded before an audience.
Dec 28, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: The Supernatural North
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough journeys to northern Norway in search of the supernatural icy world that haunts the imagination of writers including Philip Pullman and A.S. Byatt.
Dec 14, 2014•43 min
Sunday Feature: The Fundamentalist Queen
Samira Ahmed explores the extraordinary rise and fall of the Lady Protectress Elizabeth, wife of Oliver Cromwell - a commoner who became "queen" in the 1650s.
Dec 11, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: A Cultural History of the Plague
Laura Ashe tells the story of the Black Death and discovers how plague changed our cultural landscape, and influences our responses to current emergencies such as Ebola.
Nov 30, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: In the Shadow of the Tower
Andrew Hussey travels across Paris to understand how the Eiffel Tower, and the huge World's Fair that gave birth to it, shaped French culture.
Nov 23, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: New Generation Thinkers
Christopher Harding explores the influence of Freud in India, China and Japan, and John Gallagher focuses on the history of the foreign language phrase book.
Nov 16, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: God and the Great War
Frank Cottrell Boyce on the impact of the First World War on religion at home and at the Front.
Nov 09, 2014•44 min
Kitty Marion and The Poetry of Science
Gregory Tate explores why many C19th scientists wrote poetry, as do several today. Fern Riddell rediscovers the astonishing life of Kitty Marion: singer, suffragette, firestarter.
Nov 03, 2014•46 min
Enter the Dragon Chinese Theatre in the 21st century
Rana Mitter travels to Beijing to explore the recent flourishing of theatre in China and its re-invention as an art-form of youthful, urban cool.
Oct 20, 2014•43 min
Sunday Feature: Who Was Richard Strauss?
Richard Strauss's works are staples of both concert hall and opera house, and yet relatively little is known or discussed of the man himself. What we do know about Strauss - that he was incredibly astute financially, that his relationship with the Nazis was "complicated", and that his wife Pauline was as assertive and domineering as his mother was not - is a roughly-drawn portrait of the man which was propagated by almost all his contemporaries, and indeed by Strauss himself. A man who strove to...
Oct 12, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: Global Classical Music - A New World Symphony
In the final programme in the series Petroc Trelawny measures the impact and effectiveness of education in sustaining and nurturing the massive growth in Western Classical music.
Oct 05, 2014•43 min
Sunday Feature: Global Classical Music - A New World Symphony
The second programme in Petroc Trelawny’s series looking at the new Global passion for classical music. In programme one his attention was on the dramatic new concert hall’s, opera houses and cultural centres which make such a bold and apparently determined statement of intention about the art form. In this programme the focus switches to a new world of performers.
Sep 28, 2014•44 min
Sunday Feature: Global Classical Music- A New World Symphony
Petroc Trelawny presents a three part Sunday Feature series looking at the way Western Classical Music is flourishing in often surprising new territories. In the first programme he considers the importance of the buildings that have come to symbolise this new development in Global Classical Music – and that leads inevitably – to China.
Sep 22, 2014•45 min
I Have Been Here Before
Francis Spufford explores how An Experiment with Time, written by former soldier and aircraft designer J.W. Dunne, had a profound influence on J.B. Priestley and others for decades.
Sep 15, 2014•44 min
The Devastation of British Art
Diarmaid MacCulloch tells the story of iconoclasm during the English Reformation.
Aug 08, 2014•44 min
How Did Scotland's Artists Turn Nationalist
Scotland goes to the polls on the 18th September to decide its constitutional future. Why do so many of Scotland's writers and artists support the Yes Campaign? Stuart Kelly investigates.
Jul 13, 2014•43 min
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