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.

On tonight's program, a classic play which examines the pains of a liberal conscience in an authoritarian community,

where even marriage is conjugated in terms of justice and of magistrates.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me and judge me not.

I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man, John, only somewhat bewildered.

Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

Richard Almutage as John Proctor and Anna Maidly as his wife Elizabeth in a visceral new production of the

crucible by Arthur Miller, a liberal who it seems speaks to our own times, who will be talking

to the play's director, Yale Farber, soon. Before that, though, we want to test the resilience

of liberalism, with a capital L, which stretches from J.S. Mill to Francis Fouquet-Arma and beyond,

on the occasion of a new history of that most ungraspable of political and philosophical practices.

The recent EU election, with their anti-globalisation emphasis, the mass movement of people within Europe,

which seems to be fraying

liberal notions of tolerance, the rise of cultures and economies from China to Turkey that are

clearly not liberal. These are just few of the signs that liberalism whose death has been

announced so many times is again under pressure. But before we look at the pains and pleasures of liberalism, now I want to talk with Edmund Fawcett.

His new book begins with liberalism's blissful confidence in the early 19th century, but not Edmund with liberty.

No, I don't start with liberty because liberty actually, when you think about it, has been used by virtually everybody in politics.

Almost all liberal's rivals have claimed to stand also on the side of liberty.

So I thought that if we're trying to figure out what it is, what liberalism is, what matters about it. Liberty probably wasn't the place to

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