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, all human life is here from hideous crimes to our dogged belief in progress and human improvement.

Joshua Oppenheimer will be talking to me about his revelatory new film, The Act of Killing,

and we'll be reviewing David Mammett's take

on the murder trial of the music producer Phil Specter.

Why do you have so many guns?

I might need one.

How would you need more than one?

I don't know. How many pairs of shoes do you have?

How many feet?

Al Pacino is Phil Spector there and more about that later on.

But first, Claire Massoud is an author who delves beneath the smooth surface of American middle-class life

and sweeps us along in the eddies of tightly controlled emotion and dissatisfactions,

the ones that seeth beneath upbeat manners and the carapace of professional success.

Mersud's best-selling novel, The Emperor's Children, examined the intertwining fates of metropolitan

characters in the run-up to 9-11 in New York. In her new book, The Woman Upstairs,

she moves us to the haven of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a calmer world, but only on the surface.

Nora is a primary school teacher who tells us on page one that she's always been a model of good behaviour,

but she wells with anger about the state of feminism, the world of superficial images, and about herself.

...