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.

You're a radio three listener, so there's probably quite a lot of culture in your life.

Tonight, we're going to do something about that.

Consider this edition of rethinking a cultural desert.

Heat, space, sand, bleached animal bones, perhaps a cactus.

Perhaps not even a cactus.

Perhaps only this desert at moss sound effect.

And then, not that.

And then, nothing, except three figures on the horizon,

three figures clarifying out of the heat haze,

like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia,

or watching and waiting, like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas,

or Harry Dean Stanton in anything pretty much. They might be mirages, I suppose, but let me tell you who they

seem to me to be. Jeff Dyer first, a fine writer of books such as yoga for people who can't be

bothered to do it, and a man whose literary career always reminds me,

and I mean this in the nicest possible way, Jeff,

of that episode of Charlie Brown,

in which the kids gone a school trip to a museum,

but accidentally go to the supermarket instead.

Let me give you a sample sentence from his new book, White Sands.

...