The Reith Lectures (Tuesday, 9am, Radio 4) of 2016 are given by philosopher, cultural theorist and offspring of the daughter of a British wartime cabinet minister and a Ghanaian independence activist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. In the first of four lectures he speaks to an audience at the London School of Economics about creed and how adherence to a religion is as much about practice as it is about belief. There is no such thing as back to basics in matters spiritual. “Fundamentalism,” he says, “relies on the very thing it repudiates: interpretive latitude.” The second, recorded in Glasgow, will be about country; the third, from Accra, will deal with colour; while the final one, from New York, will explore culture.
You can find recordings of previous Reith Lectures on the BBC iPlayer. Some speakers are still well-known today, though George Carstairs, who had the gig in 1962, is a new one on me. However, even in those Cholmondley-Warner days, he knew about the punchy opening. “I’m going to talk to you about teenagers,” he began, “which inevitably means I’m going to talk about violence and sex.”
Rebecca Front and her brother Jeremy return with another five Incredible Women (Weekdays, 7.45pm, Radio 4). Each of their invented characters works in a specialist field and each programme involves a guest appearance from a real-life specialist in that area. On Monday, the woman is Astrid the Robot and the guest is Professor Noel Sharkey; on Tuesday, Maureen Lipman guests on a profile of alleged enfant terrible of performance theatre Bella Hayman; while on Friday, Martin Kemp appears in a programme about the members of an 80s synthpop group called Christalle.
Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John D Rockefeller and JP Morgan were the great disruptors of technology and transport. They were the ones who transformed the US into an industrial economy in the second half of the 19th century. Adam Smith, the presenter of The Robber Barons (Weekdays, 1.45pm, Radio 4), explains that the term comes from a New York Times editorial which complained that the entrepreneurs were making huge profits by cannibalising ways of doing things in a way the previous incumbents hadn’t considered. The paper now says much the same about Facebook and Google.
Michael Powell, one of the men behind masterpieces such as The Red Shoes and A Matter Of Life And Death, was one of Britain’s great film-makers. His legacy was rescued by a famous fan, Martin Scorsese. Powell’s later years were enriched by his marriage to Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who was 35 years his junior. Thelma & Michael: Love In The Cutting Room (Thursday, 11.30am Radio 4) tells the story of their meeting and marriage with contributions from Scorsese and Schoonmaker.
