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, tonight on free thinking, we'll ask if the beautiful mind of a mathematician

might benefit from the beautiful prose of a novelist,

as Marcus de Sotoi explains why he values the arts as much as he does numbers.

As a new president settles in in Sri Lanka, two of the country's best-known writers,

Romish Gunasekara and Rue Freeman Freeman discuss the thorny relationship between writing and politics

in a country still raw and divided by conflict.

But first, I know what you're thinking.

It wouldn't be free thinking if we didn't have some clog dancing,

especially when it's described in the voice of one of Britain's greatest living poets.

This stadium was where my clog-dancing satyrs, with fallacies upright, had their world premiere.

The trackers of Oxirinkus.

Sophocles fragments, as inspiring to me as a whole intact corpus.

A papyrus, most missing, I made into a play twenty-five years

since, here where I'm standing, hearing rocks echo with my chorus's clogs. That was an extract from

Polygons, the latest poem by Tony Harrison, who tonight was awarded the David Cohen Prize.

That's a prize awarded every two years for a body of work, rather than a single play or collection of poetry,

and the list of those who've won it reads like British Literature 101,

Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, Hillary Mantell and Julian Barnes amongst them.

Now Tony Harrison has joined their number.

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