Summer in radio-land, and the repeats descend like autumn leaves in a garden. On one recent day, Radio 4’s schedules featured no fewer than 10, amounting to nearly a sixth of the day’s output. In an atmosphere of spirited archive-robbing, it was a pleasure to chance upon the philosopher Robert Rowland Smith amusing a live audience at Somerset House with the suggestion that we are living at the end of the age of ideas (5 August).Naturally, Smith, a former Prize Fellow of All Souls, had taught his subject long enough to realise the fundamental paradox of the thesis he now began to argue, for to claim that we inhabit an era in which ideas have ceased to matter is, of course, an idea. Moreover, it was not, as he explained, that people had ceased to think, rather that the schemes t