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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Welcome to Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival here at the Sage Gateshead.

Now, do you remember the Arab Spring?

How did we come from the euphoria of those

gatherings and mass rallies in Tunis and Cairo to the rather more complex reality of today, with

Islamists often benefiting in the polls? Syria, which started out, we thought, as another popular

uprising against a dynastic dictatorship, is now entrenched in a nascent civil war,

with Islamists from all over the region and indeed from Europe heading in for a share of the fighting and the atrocities.

The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen has spent much of the past two decades reporting from the region,

and his new book, The Arab Uprisings, is his account

of the past year or so. Cairo-born Tara Gosman is a political economist and author of

Egypt on the brink. He's been researching and analyzing the changing face of Egypt for many years

and how its history helps understand the massive transition underway now. The us and them is not

merely a nominally Christian West viewing an Islamic Middle East. As some countries embark on their

new experiments of democracy, others seem to be reopening centuries-deep divisions between

ethnic and religious groups and factions, perhaps most dangerously, Sunni

...