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, and you find me in an empire state of mind because I have strong memories of this place. For years,

this building, India House on Aldwich in London, was where you came to get visas to visit India.

Fans overhead, long queues, and the abiding fear that you might not have brought a copy of your

birth certificate in triplicate, sending you to the back of the queue. But when I was a teenager,

sitting in the queue inside the building, I never spent much time thinking about the outside

of it, and I should have done, because it's one of the most remarkable legacies of the British

Empire left in Britain, a classical building with Hindu iconography. It's just one example of the way that our centuries of history

with empire has created a whole legacy that we often just ride past on a number 14 bus. Later,

I'll be asking whether India's new prime minister will be the first one to get past that legacy.

But first, I'll be talking to someone who's been tracing that intricate relationship between the rise of the city and the history of empire.

And that's the politician, Tristram Hunt.

He was elected a Labour MP in 2010, and now he's juggling his duties as shadow education secretary with a new book,

ten cities that made an empire.

Hunt's book is a world tour from Dublin to Boston to New Delhi,

showing that one of the biggest impacts that Empire made was in our cities,

both overseas and right here at home.

And Tristram Hunt's with me here now.

Well, we're standing beneath the six-story, beautifully restored, Herbert Baker designed

India House, which is, of course, at the bottom of Kingsway, which was meant to be this great

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