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.

As a bookish child, my first visit to the old British Library Reading room featured the excitement of seeing for the first

time notebooks of writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens under the glass

cabinets of the manuscript room. Part archive, part insight into the creative mind, part rock star memorabilia.

The writer's notebook has become like celluloid or audio tape, a physical concept in danger of

disappearing. The British Library has made it easier for people anywhere to explore

writer's notebook archives, recently launching its discovering literature website, which

features manuscripts and notebooks that can be scrutinised up close from the comfort of your

own laptop or tablet computer.

The novelist Lawrence Norfolk is of the generation that grew up, along with the word processor and the personal computer,

but has brought free thinking his own reflections on the notebooks he keeps.

As the process of writing novels becomes ever more digitised and novelists type straight into laptops, will the

notebook survive? And how would its demise change the curation of writing? Lawrence, you've

been brooding on the importance of the notebook. Tell me why. I suppose when when writers meet,

one of the things that they talk about other than what what shall we eat, is how do you work?

And I've been asked this a lot of times, and you never get the same answer or give the same answer twice.

So the process becomes mysterious. You look at the published work, and it looks completely finished and monumental and so on and so forth.

But it's not, of course. The process is haphazard, random. It's filled with false starts and indecisions. And the place where that haphazard process leaves its trace is the notebook. So by looking at notebooks, you can see what really goes on under the hood, as it were, of the car of literature. Well, we're also joined in this studio by the writer Bidisha and by Rachel Foss from the British Library.

And I wonder, Bidisha, how you feel about the notebook in your writing life?

I don't know what I do without them. And in fact, when Lawrence was talking, my blood was running cold because I was imagining what I, what would happen if I didn't have the pen and the notebook in my bag or within reaching distance at all times.

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