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.

What have the Victorians done for us?

There's an obvious answer to that question, one that involves sanitation,

electricity, railways, cinema, bovril, Reeboks, Beecham's powders and Sainsbury's. But let's

reframe the question, what are the Victorians done for us lately? What are they to us? Now the last of

them is gone. For years they were the villains, those fools in old-style hats and

coats. For Litton Strait, he and his peers, they were a bunch of mouthing, bungling hypocrites.

In a letter to Virginia Woolf, he asked, is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the

Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? Now, though, we've assigned them another role.

For a century, Victorian

Britain was written up as a kind of prison. Slowly, as time passes, it's looking more like a

playground, a place to have fun, a place to explore our passions, a place in which we question

ourselves, rather than simply administer punishment beatings to our ancestors for not being us.

The contemporary British novel is mining the 19th century past for stories.

TV dramas such as Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful

are demonstrating that there's more than one version of the Victorian past.

And right now at the British Library in London,

the pleasures of Victorian entertainment

are being relearned and reinvented. On tonight's edition of Freethinking, we explore the Neo-Victorian

world through new fiction and new academic research. And with me is a travelling circus of

...