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

it. 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, I'm Ron Amitter, and today I'm in a Cardiff frame of mind. We hear novelist Nadifa Mohammed's new work on a tragic

incident in its past and an update on the excitement in the art scene in its post-pandemic present,

plus a new take on an old favourite as the National Theatre takes us under Milkwood. That's all

after this word. Hello, my name's Ian McMillan, and before you slide into the podcast you were expecting, let me tell you a little bit about my programme The Verbe, Radio 3's Literary Festival, Language Coffee, and Journey to the Centre of the Sentence. We'll hear new poems and stories, specially commissioned for the show, and we'll ask the kinds of questions that writers really like to be asked, like, do you use a pen or a pencil? No, I promise, we won't ask that one. I use a pen, by the way. Subscribe to the verb on BBC Sounds. I wrote that with a pen.

Hello, a few years ago, the novelist Nadifah Muhammad saw a clipping from a newspaper dated

in 1952. The chilling headline was Woman Weeps as Somali is hanged. Well, Nadifah's with me here.

Nadifah, could you tell me more about the story behind that headline?

That was the end of a six-month drama tragedy in Butteown, Cardiff, in 1952,

where Mahid Matan, a Somali sailor who'd stopped going to sea, was falsely accused of a murder

and sent to the gallows in Cardiff. And Laura, his widow, didn't find out that he'd been executed until she turned

up at the prison gates, expecting to see him. And to add, you know, even more sorrow to the

situation, it was also their eldest son's birthday that day. Nadifa has taken the story and made

at the heart of the Fortune Men, her new work that brings facts and fiction together.

And she's very well placed to do that because she was named as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

And her last novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Moorm Award.

And we're going to return to her new novel in just a moment.

But it starts off today's

free thinking, which brings together ideas of community, both shared and divided, with a particular

emphasis on one major city, Cardiff. We'll hear more about the global art coming to Artes-Mundi,

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