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.

This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three.

Tonight on nightwaves, history lessons from the far and more recent past.

There's war and spectacle in 360 degrees with Robert LaPage's bold new theatrical experience

about the deserts of Las Vegas and Iraq.

What does the papal schism of 1415 tell us about the resignation of Pope Benedict the 16th?

And as relations with Argentina and the European Union trouble the current government, an official foreign office historian tackles Britain's troubled post-war history with both in her book on six moments of crisis from Suez to the Falklands.

But first, the rapid transformation of modern India has inspired many journalists and economists to write books exploring its totems.

Books such as Geek Nation and Planet India have focused on the Information Tech Hub of Bangalore,

the Tata mass market microcar nano,

and the growth of the middle class consuming in shopping malls and chain coffee shops,

as well as the persistent challenge of poverty and corruption.

The novelist Amit Joudhry has written extensively about the city of his birth, Calcutta, but only in fiction.

He was brought up in Bombay and spent many years in the UK, but returned to Calcutta in 1999. He spends more than half the year there

and won't call it Kolkata, as the government has renamed it. The rest of the year he spends

mostly in Norwich, where he's Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East

Anglia. Calcutta, the title of his new non-fiction book,

sees him renegotiating the spaces of his childhood and his dreams.

Once the ultimate modern metropolis forged in the 19th century

as a capital of industry and imperial bureaucracy,

...