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.

Stanley Fish once asked, is there a text in this class?

He asked it because he was a literary theorist,

and it was the mid-1970s when such questions were unavoidable, and the harpoons were out

for traditional ways of thinking about what literature meant, or what anything meant. Relativism

was absolute, depending on your point of view. There are two texts approaching us now, both of them informed by the intellectual debates of the 1970s,

and this bit of John Williams' music should be giving you a sense of their streamlined progress towards us.

One is explicitly fishy. It's called Shark, a novel that began as a meditation

upon one of the great speeches in cinema history, the one from Jaws about a group of shipwrecked

American sailors and the beasts that circle them in the water. It's a novel by Will Self,

one of the most vital and vigorous writers of his generation.

The other is a species of manual for those hoping to attain that status, written by one of

the world's leading rationalist thinkers.

Grammar and syntax are to Stephen Pinker, what the beaks of Galapagos Finches were to Darwin.

And in an age increasingly defined by textual communication, he suggests,

our sentences require as much intelligent design as our brains can give them.

But I think the most compelling question that we'll decide tonight is this.

What happens when Will Self and Stephen Pinker are in a room together

discussing language and literary style? Nothing boring, that's for sure. We could borrow a

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