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.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello.

Recently, the world seems to have had a bit of a four horseman of the modern apocalypse moment.

War, plague, famine and massive debt restructuring.

And it sometimes looks as if our political class is a bit out of its depth when it comes to answers.

Later on, we'll hear from Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey

about his new novel, which tackles one aspect of that crisis,

the rise of the surveillance state,

and looks back to the 1970s to try and work out what went wrong.

But we start with an intriguing suggestion that the answer to our problems might lie

not in looking back 40 years, but possibly 400 or more.

As our politicians put together their manifestos for next spring, setting out their

policy stalls for the next five years, the historian David Armitage of Harvard University has put

out his own call to arms for policy makers. It's co-authored with Joe Gouldy, and it's titled

The History Manifesto. The book argues that if we want to rethink our stance on policy problems in the future,

then politicians need to hear more from historians,

and historians need to speak more to decision-makers.

Earlier, David Armitage joined me down the line from Cambridge, Massachusetts,

and with me in the studio was Lucy DeLap,

director of the organisation

...