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, 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 is 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 the BBC.

Hello and welcome to the arts and Ideas Download from the Free Thinking Team at the BBC.

When this writer came into the studio several years ago, he said he thought the best books were written by the young.

Now whether he was right or wrong, his own first novel published when he was 27 is hailed

as a landmark. To one commentator, it is the greatest novel ever written by a sportsman. To the late

writer Gordon Byrne, it was a masterpiece, and to many others its writer is one of the post-war

greats. His fellow novelist A.S.ek, called him an English Dostoevsky.

He's certainly one of a kind, a writer who happened to be at the same time a professional rugby player and an art school student.

Our subject in this free-thinking landmark is the novel This Sporting Life, published in 1960

by the novelist, playwright and screenwriter David Storry, who died earlier this year,

and who was garlandered with awards, not least the Booker Prize for his 1976 work Saville.

The story of this sporting life is told by Arthur Machen, a young and violent working-class man who becomes a professional rugby league player.

We watch as he navigates the power relationships in the club where others want to own him.

We see him with his landlady, Mrs Hammond, a widow, a woman who is ashamed of their relationship and whom he perhaps rapes.

We see him in the community, a celebrity, at once above those who revere him, an incandescent with rage about them.

As he puts it, I don't enjoy getting knocked about on a football field for other people's amusement.

I enjoy it if I'm being paid a lot for it.

Joining me to talk about the novel This Sporting Life, it was made in 1963 into a film

directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Richard Harris, the social historian Juliet

...