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, 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 is 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, I'm Anne McHawoy.

Thanks for downloading this Arts and Ideas podcast from the BBC's

Free Thinking Team. Welcome everybody.

Good evening. It's 500 years since Martin Luther and his ideas sparked a protest that

burned a huge hole through Western Christendom in the 16th century.

When he died in 1546 at the age of 63, the Reformation he'd helped to launch had taken hold,

and there was no denying that Europe's house stood divided.

Yet the glare of events and the tangled politics of his time have obscured the character of Luther and the subtlety of his arguments.

What made him a brilliant preacher as well as a foul-mouthed polemicist?

A disobedient son and a loyal husband.

And of course, what drove him, a lowly friar to challenge the authority of the Pope? Was he a fundamentalist

reactionary or the enlightened creator of our modern world? To help answer these questions, I'm

joined by Dermot McCulloch, whose book Reformation won the Wolfson Prize for History, by

Eulinka Rubelach, author of Reformation Europe, and by Peter Stanford, whose biography

Martin Luther, Catholic dissident, will be published next month. So Peter, as the most recent

of Luther's many biographers, you are very well placed to tell us a bit about who he was and what

kind of man we're dealing with and how his character was formed.

He liked to tell people that he was the son of a simple farmer and he told a story about his mother

...