13. The Cold Water of Fear- Alfred Hitchcock arrives in Hollywood: 1941. Tinsel town's fat new boy, whose 'Rebecca' has just won the first Oscar for best movie of 1940, relates his early life and British period of film-making. An interesting and insightful question and answer period ensues.
14. Pshaw!!! - George Bernard Shaw at ninety: GBS recalls his long, controversial and eventful life on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. A change to encounter one of the wittiest and most celebrated writers of the 20th century.
15. Memoirs of Shelley, Byron and the Author - Edward John Trelawny remembers: In the age of Victorian respectability, the reprobate Trelawny recalls his friendship with Shelley and Byron. The man supposedly "responsible for the deaths of two major poets" takes you on a roller-coaster of Romanticism in which he puts himself center stage.
16. Frank Lloyd Wright: The irascible and visionary architect reveals his plans for the Guggenheim in NYC, and reflects upon the storms, stresses and successes of his tempestuous life.
17. Wisest Fool - An audience with King James VI & I: 1624, old King James vents his spleen on tobacco and recalls the fascinating life of the first King of Great Britain and first King of English-speaking America.
18. Rats, Riots and Romantics - Theophile Gautier on 19th Century Paris and the Romantic Ballet: Fricaseeing rats for his supper during the 1870 Prussian Siege if Paris, 'le bon Theo' recalls 'the city of light' of his youth - la vie de Boheme, his fellow Romantic poets and artists, the gristtes and courtesans, and the opera-ballet.
19. Dinner with Doctor Benjamin Franklin - An excellent guest - Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation.[1] As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.
Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."[2] To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin, "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."[3]