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 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, 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, Pipp Pirip,

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 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, works that describe his encounters with Israelis

and Palestinians at the hard edge of the conflict that divides them. His best-known novel,

See Under Love, ends with a prayer that we may live in this world from birth to death and know

nothing of war. It's a knowledge Grossman himself cannot unlearn. Seven and a half years ago,

his 20-year-old son Yuri, a soldier in the Israeli army, was killed in Lebanon during the 2006 war

with Hezbollah. His new book, falling out of time, is a response to

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