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.

This is the BBC.

Other people, mysterious, aren't they? We look into their eyes and try to read what's there.

But what can we really know? Perhaps much of the time we're just seeing what we want to see.

She loves me, we think. No, she wants to poison me. And the rest of the time we're not even looking.

There are four of them in this room with me,

other people, I mean. The novelist and essayist Andrew O'Hagan is one of them, here to talk about

what he thinks is happening inside the head of Julian Assange, which he spent quite a lot of time

looking at. The comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes is here. She's been thinking about the inner lives of people in Greek tragedy, the ones who don't get their names in the titles.

The new generation thinker Islam Issa is here too, to talk about first impressions, snap judgments and Shakespeare.

But first, we're going to consider one of the great stories about the inaccessibility of others,

Daphne de Morier's My Cousin Rachel, in which a man called Philip conceived as a passion

for an enigmatic woman who's married into his family for one of two reasons, either she loves

them or she wants to kill them for their money. It was filmed in 1952 with Olivia de Haverland as Rachel

and Richard Burton as Philip. Now Roger Michel, director of Notting Hill, Le Weekend, and

that famously unmanicured TV version of Jane Austen's Persuasion has cast Sam Claflin as

Philip and Rachel Weiss as the woman about whom everyone seems to have a theory.

I've been doing a little asking around.

Did you know that the duel in which her first husband died was fought over one of her lovers?

Well, I don't believe that.

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