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. On tonight's

program, a book made when Europe was at war with itself, written by someone banished from his home,

a poem more recently loved by the Anglican T.S. Eliot and by Thomas Harris's serial killer Hannibal Lecter,

a work saturated with a recognition of the power of love, whose greatest imaginative achievement is, nevertheless, the inferno hell.

On the 750th anniversary of Dante Allegheny's birth,

we devote this evening's free thinking to the Divine Comedy,

an epic poem written over more than ten years in the early part of the 14th century, made up of three parts,

the Inferno, Pugatorio and Paradiso, which begins with a man in the middle of life lost in a dark wood,

guided by Virgil the great Roman poet, he begins his journey into the underworld.

Baccio and Gustav Dore illustrated it,

graphic novels have mulched it, and poets have regularly made their own versions.

Is the Divine Comedy our poem for all seasons? Well, to discuss its status as a landmark, I'm joined by the poet Sean O'Brien down the line from Newcastle,

who's made his own version of the inferno, by Prue Shaw, author of Reading Dante,

by the cultural critic, Kevin Jackson, who's written a graphic novel version of the inferno,

and by Nick Haverley, author of Dante's British public.

Kevin Jackson, why do you think that

the Divine Comedy is a classic? There are many ways of defining a classic. One of my favourite

ones is that it's a ghost that won't be exercised forever. It could lie quiet for a century or so,

but then it comes bouncing back whether you want it or not. But I think you can come closer and more generously to the truth

by thinking of something Ezra Pound once said,

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