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.

Hello, and welcome to the arts and ideas download

from the free thinking team at the BBC.

Hello, on this evening's programme, a man for most seasons,

as at home writing about migratory geese over Manhattan,

as about the Marlian photographer Seidoucater,

as ready to encounter V.S. Nypole in person,

as the words of James Baldwin in a Swiss spa town. He's novelist, photographer and art historian, as well as someone who sees Instagram

and Twitter as part of his resources. Teju Cole was born in the US to Nigerian parents in

1975, raised in Nigeria and returned to the US when he was 17.

He first came to international notice with Open City, a novel centred on a doctor, Julius, wandering through the streets of Manhattan, encountering people and places, prompting in him thoughts

of culture and identity. Julius seems to be a way that the novel explores what a sensitive

liberal consciousness can know and the limits of that knowing. It won the Penn Hemingway event

and was much lauded. His new book is a

collection of essays, the title taken from a Seamus Heaney poem, Known and Strange Things. Its subjects

are wonderfully promiscuous, ranging from a rumination on the crisis of photography to one entitled

the White Saviour Industrial Complex and including directly autobiographical essays from one entitled Home Strange Home to the last in the volume where the writer has to confront his own possible future blindness.

Tadu Kohl joins me now in front of an audience at London's South

Bank Centre where the London Literature Festival takes place.

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