An enterprising idea from BBC Four and The Open University: they asked the historian Bettany Hughes to present three documentaries about great thinkers of the pre-Christian era. In the coming weeks we will hear about Socrates and Confucius, but this week it was the life and thought of Siddhartha Guatama, in Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World (5 August). The format is strictly one genius per programme. It might have been nice to have a bit of “compare and contrast”, but instead Hughes took us on a walk through the traditional biography of the Buddha. “Traditional” is the accurate term for the story, which was handed down for several hundred years before anything was written. That did not harm the television narrative, although our presenter began with a reminder th