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.

This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three.

Hello, and welcome to free thinking in the summer here in York.

And I'm going to turn away for a moment to a place very far from this beautiful medieval city.

To Syria, where the current crisis has seen that country torn apart as a ruling dynasty

desperately seeks to cling to power and the elites calculate which side to back.

But 600 years ago, it wasn't the Middle East, but right here in the north of England, where

that brutal reality of civil war was taking place during the wars of the roses. Everyone knows that

name, but the slightly heritage tea shop title that we've given these wars with the distance of

time has separated us from the reality of the destruction visited on England between 1455

and 1485 when rival lines of the Plantagenet dynasty fought

for control of the English throne. Four kings came and went, and characters appeared in the

national story who continue to haunt our memory, the princes in the tower, Henry Tudor, and of course

Bad King Dick, Richard III.

Now, fascination with the Wars of the Roses is as strong as ever, and to explore it, I have three experts with me today.

Historian Helen Castor, author of Blood and Roses, Mark Ormrod of York University,

and inevitably from Lancaster University, Sandy Grant. Would you please welcome them all?

Helen Castor, the Syria analogy is not far-fetched, is it? The wars of the roses were ultimately a very brutal civil war.

They were, although, of course, we give them a rather false unity by giving them that name.

What happened in the middle decades of the 15th century was that a system of government

...