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.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, on tonight's program a novel at whose heart is an extraordinary financial swindler, where the media

are partial, where people trade each other like commodities, one set in London, yet haunted by

another way of life in San Francisco and beyond. If this all sounds like a newly minted book,

it is actually a description of the way we live now,

the 1875 novel by Anthony Trollope,

whose birth 200 years ago we mark this evening.

The Way We Live Now centres on the financier Augustus Melmott,

the London hub of a major American West Coast Railway Enterprise.

He enjoys fearful adoration from London society, in this novel fixed in two families with London

and Suffolk homes and branches. There are the Carborees and the Longstaffs. But as in any other

Victorian novel, the other characters are legion,

from the wonderfully named Mrs. Hurtle, an adventurous American woman who comes to London to

follow the man she believes loves her, to an honest Suffolk farmer who comes to London to rescue

his lover from the arms of one of the carberries.

Henry James, one, said of Trollope,

that his genius resided in his complete appreciation of the usual.

But if that's so, it must include English anti-Semitism,

and a strong sense of the strength of women almost throttled by their reliance on men.

Well, to discuss the way we live now, I'm joined by Jonathan Mears, a novelist and adapter of the novel for radio, by Simon Heffer, journalist and author of many books on the 19th century,

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