Radio choice Gerard O’donovan

Book of the Week: Pharaohs of the Sun

Radio 4, 9.45am

Two new books to take us through the week. First up is Guy de la Bedoyere’s history of the wealthiest and most powerful line of pharaohs (Tutankhamun’s dynasty, the 18th) whose reign lasted from 1,550 to 1,295 BCE, the period when Egypt’s ancient civilisation reached its peak of cultural sophistication. Rather livelier is the Book at Bedtime: Mrs Bridge (Radio 4, 10.45pm), with reader Fenella Woolgar adding considerable zest to Evan S Connell’s subversive 1959 novel that illuminates the narrow materialism, moral turpitude and futility that often lies at the heart of an American life of plenty.

Leeds: Life in the Bus Lane

Radio 4, 8pm

It’s a mantra in Leeds that the city is “the biggest in Western Europe without a mass transit system”. Hard to blame the city’s residents for complaining; for decades local transport policy has revolved around roads and cars. Despite approval for funding arriving in 2001, an ambitious city-wide “supertram” project was scrapped in 2005, while a “trolleybus” scheme mooted in 2012 never happened. BBC Leeds’s Rima Ahmed rides on the local buses to ask politicians, campaigners and passengers why the city has such trouble getting its transport act together; and why, whenever it does, the plans seem to go off the rails.