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.
Latest episodes
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43 min ↗
Sound Sources
Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
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44 min ↗
Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It wa…
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44 min ↗
Tuner of the World
"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundsc…
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29 min ↗
Supply Lines
Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of 24/7 delivery.
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14 min ↗
New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
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44 min ↗
The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
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.…
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44 min ↗
The Black Cantor
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. Fam…
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14 min ↗
Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting
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…
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44 min ↗
X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
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43 min ↗
Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European
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 importan…
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43 min ↗
Government Song Woman
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 U…
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43 min ↗
Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.
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44 min ↗
O Sole Mio
“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 b…
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44 min ↗
Metal City
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 workin…
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45 min ↗
Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados
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…
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45 min ↗
Yiddish Glory
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 gh…
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44 min ↗
Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
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.…
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44 min ↗
Unlocking Anne
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 p…
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43 min ↗
What Walls Hold
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 Ch…
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44 min ↗
Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
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…