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.

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Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin's words conjuring up the world just before the outbreak of the First World War.

It's not an unusual view, but what if the years rumbling towards World War I were on the contrary, rowdy, full of dissension, intense and sometimes violent political conflict? This is the audacious view of George Dangerfield in his classic book, The Strange Death of Liberal England.

A book which the late Eric Hobsbaum said was the most exciting way to start looking at the

nation's history during this period. The strange death was written like many books about

the pre-First World War world in the 1930s in 1935.

The thesis of the strange death is that the Liberal government, during the period

2010 to 1914, and more generally English liberalism, simply could not cope with the

assaults that were made upon it, by the suffragettes, by the trade union movement

launching major strikes, by the Ulster Unionist and Edward Carson's resistance to home

rule, and by the Tory peers in the House of Lords.

As part of Radio 3's music on the brink season, free thinking wants to anatomise Dangerfield

and the death or otherwise of Liberal England in the shadow of the war,

as well as reflect on whether we are living through another death of Liberal England.

I'm joined by Baroness Shirley Williams, by Royal Foster, author of a forthcoming book

on Irish Revolutionaries of the period, by Duncan Brack of the Liberal Democratic Party History Group

and the journalist and writers Nick Cohen and B. Campbell.

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