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 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. Hello, tonight

we're going to feel the burn of a novel written in the white heat of anger by a writer who was pretty

incandescent all his life. Saul Bello would have had a hundred candles on his cake this year,

had he not already left the party in 2005. It was a long and populous life, and its plot began in

1913, two years before Bello's birth,

when his father, a trader in Egyptian onions and Spanish oranges,

fled St Petersburg for Canada to escape the Tsarist authorities,

who'd worked out that he was a Jew living in the wrong place with the wrong papers.

Which is why Saul Bello was born in Canada, under an anglicised name, conferred on

his family by an immigration official in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He'd missed his opportunity to become

Solzhenitsyn, but he'd gained the chance to become a canonical American novelist. He was a Nobel

and Pulitzer Prize winner, but he won too many awards to list here.

Neither do he really have time to enumerate his wives, and his lovers would require a role

as long as one on a war memorial in a sizable town. Of the novels and novellas of which there

were 14, we should mention Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, Humboldt's

gift, and the adventures of Orgy March. Herzog, though, is the one on our lips tonight.

In Herzog, I was having a certain amount of fun at my own expense, or I was making fun of my own type,

taking Herzog at a moment of crisis and putting on and removing the masks he

had used throughout his life.

The scholar, the Jew, the husband, the father, the lover, the romantic avenger, the intellectual,

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