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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Hello, modernist fiction has its own geography and topography, its glaciers and ravines and precipices,

the great plateau of in search of lost time, the jungle of Finnegan's wake, the high escarpments of Parades' End.

Tonight we're going to survey a vast peak that's little explored by British readers,

but which affords some of the most dazzling views in all literature.

We've assembled a team of Sherpas, who will supply everything you will need to reach its glorious summit.

It's a book that was never finished.

Death beat the author to the last chapter,

though not until its pages had reached over the thousand mark.

It wasn't even published properly in English

for over a decade after its author suffered his final stroke.

It's set in Vienna during the high noon of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

and like all the works we'll discuss this week, expresses something of the world on the brink

of the Great War. It is the man without qualities, and Robert Mucille is the man who wrote it,

or nearly wrote it. A mechanical engineer, soldier, wrestler, philosopher, he was aristocratic,

gymnastic and sypholitic, and finally an unhappy exile from his native Austria, a life through

which we could read the 20th century. The figure at the centre of the story is Ulrich, a man

characterised best by what he isn't doing. He was a scientist,

...