Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

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His new novel wraps itself around Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the time after the crucifixion, her emotions muffled by what she's lived

through. An earlier fiction, the master, imagines the great American novelist Henry James,

anguished by love and his inability to show it. But combed to being, guest in extended conversation here at the Sage Gateshead, in association

with writing North, is just as much at ease with more contemporary figures, with Alish Lacey,

a young Irish woman in the 50s in his award-winning novel Brooklyn, who never dreamed of leaving Ireland,

but does so only to be pulled back home. Or the many characters often love lawn deliberately

so in his short stories, one volume of which is called the empty family, another mothers and sons.

Comteabine was born in 1955 in Ireland, into a family, some of whose members were involved

in the Easter Rising of 1916, and he lost his own father when he was 12.

A child who loses a parent never recovers, he has said.

He's the author of six novels, has published essays, one volume of which is acerbically called

New Ways to Kill Your Mother, taught creative writing and lives in the US, Barcelona, as well as Ireland.

There seems to be an imprinprincipled restlessness about him,

like one of his heroes, Henry James. But there seems to me, Combe, to be one thread that

weaves its way through. And it's here in this new novel, in the Testament of Mary, you love endings rather than beginnings.

After all, this is a book that, as it were, begins after the end, after the crucifixion.

The beginning of the master begins by the character talking of death. What is it that draws you

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