The Radio 3 Documentary

Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical...

Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect...

Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From...

Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life

One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he...

American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was...

Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.

“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been...

Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city? Did the experience of working with metal and hearing the continuous...

From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British...

During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing...

In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that Frankie Goes to...

Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of her work focused on...

London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavistock House is...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events...