Radio choice

Pete Naughton

Living with the Gods

RADIO 4FM, 9.45AM

Neil Macgregor – former director of the British Museum, presenter of Radio 4’s hugely influential A History of the World in 100 Objects

– returns to the radio with a new series of short, interconnected, object-led documentaries. Its topic is the ways in which humans from every era have developed systems of religious belief, starting today with prehistoric man. Subsequent episodes – 29 of them – will go out at 9.45am and 7.45pm every weekday for the next six weeks. Breathtakingly good.

Daemon Voices

RADIO 4, 1.45PM

“Every sentence I write is surrounded by the ghosts of the sentences that I could have written,” says Philip Pullman in this first of five essays about storytelling. It’s an enthralling listen: erudite, thoughtful, peppered with

wisdom and humour – and works as an ideal partner piece to Book at Bedtime (10.45pm), which for the next fortnight is given over to a reading of Pullman’s latest novel, La Belle Sauvage. Written as a prequel to the His Dark

Materials trilogy, it begins in Oxford, where strange rumours are swirling.