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.

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Hello, the universe of fiction can be a cruel place.

To some novelists, characters are as flies to wanton boys.

Think of the President of the Immortals ending his sport with Tess.

Pip Pyrrip, almost failing Dickens' moral test,

or Winston Smith and those rats.

David Grossman has no such streak of sadism.

Terrible things happen in his fictional universe,

but they're terrible things that have already happened in the real world,

from which his characters must escape, or with which they must reach accommodation. The happened in the real world, from which his characters must escape

or with which they must reach accommodation. The woman in his novel to the end of the land,

who wants to re-civilise her son made barbarous by war, the writer in Sea Under Love, whom

history doomed to die at the hands of the Nazis, but Grossman rescues with a magical transformation,

the boy who longs to be liberated from the awfulness of history by death.

I really want to get to know my death, says the hero of Grossman's book of intimate grammar.

I mean, that's the important thing in life, isn't it?

Grossman was born in Jerusalem,

and his work is rooted there, though its translation into 30 languages suggests that it has no trouble finding its way beyond Israel's borders. His journalism has also been translated,

...