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, this edition of Freethinking is one of our landmarks, a programme devoted to a single work that's

a salient feature of our cultural landscape. This one is as visible as the Great Wall of China,

and comparably long, it takes time to get from one end of it to another. Its author did write

other books, but his name has been colonised and absorbed by one,

Allureche de Tom Perdue, once anglicised as the remembrance of things past,

now spoken of more frequently as in search of lost time, or just Proust, as it seems perfectly

permissible to say. It's a word that's found its way into the language.

We can talk of a Proustian moment,

a rush of memory produced by sensory experience,

such as the taste of a little cake dipped in tea,

without having experienced the Proustian weeks and months of reading the book.

A superintendent McGraw discovered in the Monty Python sketch

about the All-England summarised Proust competition,

it's hard to offer a synopsis of the work.

Its hero, whose name may or may not be Marcel,

offers an account of his life up to the point

that it seems possible that he might write the book that we have

in our hands, a story that involves his vicarious experience of the marriage of his neighbours,

the swans, his fanboy yearning to enter the glamorous world of the gamont, a rapidly decaying

...