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.

This is a download from the BBC.

For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three.

On tonight's free thinking, the novelist Joseph O'Neill gives us a comically bleak vision of Dubai in his new novel about a glitzy globalised finance centre, The Dog.

The tensions of prosperity and democracy come under scrutiny, as one of Germany's most talked-about directors Thomas Oostermeier

brings the Berlin Chau Boone's acclaimed production

of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People to the Barbican

and the sound of a former British Berlin resident

might be a clue about the theme.

Changes.

Turn and face the theme.

But first, the annual literary date with Destiny the Man Booker Awards is creeping closer.

So tonight, Freethinking continues its series of interviews with this year's nominees with Ali Smith, who's already been nominated for the prize three times. Her latest book, a

shortlisted novel, How to Be Both, vaults the centuries, combining two stories and

exploring the cusp of what we can see and what might lie beneath the surface.

It is a feeling thing to be a painter of things,

because everything, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person, has essence.

Paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick, and you'll feel it as sure as if a coin

had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first hand what petals are,

their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour,

...