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 Arts and Ideas podcast.

I'm John Galaher, and welcome to this edition of New Thinking, which is part of our

series looking at new research in UK universities. What do we talk about when we talk about sport?

In Britain in 2019, sport has been an arena for thinking about questions of race, class and

politics. Exercise is political too. In the nation's gyms,

we work out our ideas about bodies and gender, as well as our toned physiques,

while politicians in the NHS are ever more concerned to get us off the couch and into our

trainers. On today's podcast, I'm speaking with two researchers who've been thinking about our relationship

with sport over the last century or so and up to the present day. Dr. Fiona Skillan lectures in history

at Glasgow Caledonian University, and Professor Matthew Smith focuses on the history of health

and medicine at the University of Strathclyde. Fiona, your book is called Women's Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain.

What was it about women's involvement in sport between the wars

that made this a story that you wanted to tell?

It was quite a personal story, actually.

I was a golfer as a teenager, and I was very aware of the kind of the gender imbalances within my own golf club

and it got me thinking about the challenges that must have faced women trying to break into different sports in an earlier period.

And I knew from research that I had done previously that the First World War was a kind of watershed in terms of women's access to different types of leisure.

But generally, there was no clear picture about what happened after the First World War.

And so this was an area that I thought was kind of ripe for exploration.

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