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, it restructures whole continents, fractures homes,

is the subject of countless memorials and saturates culture

from the Bible and Shakespeare to the silence of the lambs.

Freethinking this evening is devoted to violence,

a subject which a new study calls a modern obsession all the way from understandable

reflections on the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags to the fact that in 2001, a study

showed that the average American child by the time he or she left elementary school would

have watched 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence,

or rather representations of such. Yet there are some who think that modern society is less violent

than previous ones. Our aim, though, is not to review the statistics of war, rape and murder

across history, rather to understand why we are now

so preoccupied with violence and why we're drawn so much to imagining it in our arts and our

culture. Shakespeare, Othello, 1622, mark me with what violence she first loved them more.

1759, Samuel Johnson, Prince of Abyssinia.

The violence of war admits no distinction.

Two definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Joining me are the award-laden crime novelist Frances Fyfield,

whose novels include casting the first stone.

Peter Stanford, author of a new study of Judas Hescariat and former editor of the Catholic Herald.

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