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, on tonight's

programme as the United Kingdom becomes more disunited and as we wait for Charles

to ascend to the throne, we ask about the monarchy and its discontents in a changing world.

Queen Elizabeth II is perhaps the last thread connecting us to the post-war settlement.

But sooner or later, there'll be a new monarch who will have to

exercise his power and influence in a much more globalised Britain. In London's West End at present,

there's a play King Charles III which imagines a much more interventionist king, and as a fact follows fiction, it's been rumoured that Charles intends to be a much more culturally vocal monarch than Elizabeth has been.

A high court action brought by the Guardian newspaper wants to bring to public view the black spider memos they're called that Charles has been writing to politicians.

If successful, they'll probably give us a glimpse of our future king. Of course, the past is

never dead, and even earlier monarchs still haunt our lives. There's King Billy, William of Orange,

who is painted on the sides of loyalist houses in Northern Ireland,

and some English Republicans hold fast to the memory that we were once a republic after the

execution of Charles I, and Margaret Thatcher had a habit of conjuring up the times of Queen

Victoria when she wanted a picture of the kind of Britain

she aspired to. So free-thinking this evening takes out its crystal ball with a group of historians

and commentators to ask what the history of the monarchy in Britain might tell us about the shape

of the monarchy to come.

My guests are Sarah Bradford, biographer of the present Queen, John Guy and Philip Ziegler, the writers respectively, of volumes on Henry the 8th and George the 6th in a series

Penguin is publishing on the English and British monarchs, the Guardian Columnist Deborah

and on the line from Boston, Massachusetts,

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