The week in radio: The Rise of the Robots; I, Robot; In Our Time: John Clare

It's said that there was a time when a well-educated individual could be an authority on all the most important areas of science, art and culture. Although that period, if it ever existed, is long passed, you can sometimes believe it's possible to re-enter it by listening, almost indiscriminately, to Radio 4. Did you know, for example, that the word "robot" comes from an old Slavonic word for slave or actually, more accurately, "forced labour"? That was one of the memorable facts recounted by Adam Rutherford in The Rise of the Robots. It was the Czech playwright Karel Čapek who introduced its modern meaning nearly 100 years ago in his play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). But as Rutherford noted, these "immigrants from the future" have been haunting the human imagination for much longer than that.