THE historian Lord Briggs wrote: “To talk about broadcasting is to talk about everything else.” In Sunday Feature: The sonic century — the microphone (Radio 3, Sunday), the oral historian Alan Dein made the case for thinking about the microphone in the same way: an object which, though normally hidden from sight, plays such a formative part in facilitating our present and constructing our past.

Most of us carry around microphones of one sort or another; many will have them embedded in household devices. But all of us invest in recordings of past voices and events a confidence that the microphone is imparting some sense of truth and authenticity.

That is the case even when the recording originates in a late 19th-century anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits. Befogged by hiss and crackle, this is the earliest ethnographic recording still surviving; and, although the vocal group recorded must have strained to have their voices captured by the phonograph, the recording beguiles us into feeling that, somehow, this represents an authentic snapshot of the past. The microphone, in whatever shape or form it might take, is as intrusive a piece of staging as a proscenium arch.

There were many insights in this imaginative presentation, not least the way in which microphones have become both a help and hindrance to performers. As a prop, it provides rock stars with something to swing around their heads. It enables crooners whose voices would not otherwise reach the front row of the stalls to sing Puccini. And it tricks public speakers into thinking that they need not project. If the art of Demosthenes dies, we know what to blame.

Much has been made in the run-up to the World Cup of human-rights violations in the host nation (Comment, 4 November). In The Documentary Podcast (World Service, released Saturday), Salma El-Wardany sought to answer the question whether women in Qatar feel the privations of living in a traditional, authoritarian society as keenly as do migrant workers and the LGBTQ community.

It was a difficult brief; for, despite the guardianship laws which prevent women from marrying or travelling abroad (under the age of 25) without permission, most of the women she spoke to seemed genuinely content; and hardly likely to swap their status for the notional “freedoms” of the West.

And, finally, a brain-teaser: if it takes eight printers eight minutes to print eight brochures, how long would it take 24 printers to print 24 brochures? Posed as a trailer to the new series of All in the Mind (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), the puzzle is intended to deter us from the blandishments of neat patterns and to the rigours of rational thought. Claudia Hammond’s guest for the show was Professor Steven Pinker, who has a new book on the subject, which, with Professor Pinker’s trademark flair for rhetoric, warns of the “pandemic of poppycock” enveloping civilisation. (You will have guessed by now that the answer is not 24.)