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, 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.

I'm Matthew Sweet.

Thanks for downloading this edition of Radio 3's Arts and Ideas program, Freethinking.

Culture, are you for it or against it?

Are you its friend or its enemy?

150 years ago, Matthew Arnold, poet, critic, school inspector

and one of the most restless critical minds of the 19th century turned up in a lecture

theatre in a British university to deliver a talk that he thought might cause a bit of a stir.

He was right, culture and its enemies, and the book into which it would mutate, culture and

anarchy, has never quite stopped its agitations. It's a difficult book, a book that asks us to

think about the value of difficult books, and asks much else besides. Is culture something that we

attain, or something that we carry within us? Does your

engagement with art and literature make you a better person? A figure of sweetness and light,

as he put it, or can bad people love Beethoven too? We may not be able to settle those questions

tonight, but we might decide at the end of the program whether the act of trying

to do so has improved us. Arnold's lecture theatre was in Oxford. Our is here at the University

of Sussex. He was the only turn that night, but we can give you four. Will Aberley is one of our

new generation thinkers and works in the Victorian Studies Department here at Sussex.

Stella Duffy is a novelist and theatre maker who's developed a project first dreamed up in East London in the 1960s,

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