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.

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Hello. We devote tonight's programme to an assessment of Lady Thatcher's legacy. The journalist Nick Cohen observed yesterday that her death had apparently turned middle-aged Britain into the sealed knot society, reenacting the civil war of the 1980s with blank bullets and fake gunsmoke.

So are we all roundheads or cavaliers around the table here in assessing how she changed the culture and politics of British life?

We'll be discussing her place in history, the ideology of Thatcherism and how it's shaped modern Britain.

And what has been the impact on British culture of the Prime Minister who put branding strategy at the heart of politics

and was so often dismissed by the arts establishment as a Philistine?

Joining me are historians Dominic Sandbrook and Selina Todd, classical historian Edith Hall. The writers, Peter Hitchens and Will Self.

Mark Littlewood, director of the free market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the former Conservative MP and minister, Edwina Curry.

Let's start with how to assess her place in post-war history.

Dominic Sandbrook, in the last few days, we've seen all this imagery of the decade of confrontation,

the Battle of Allgreaves, the Falklands War, the Poltax riots.

How far is it Lady Thatcher's character actually shaping that history?

Well, clearly Mrs Thatcher stamped her personality on the 1980s in a way that very

few Prime Ministers do with other periods of history. If you think how much things change between

1979 and 1990, it's impossible to think about all that without thinking of the kind of the woman

with the handbag, as it were. But it's an odd thing that the critics of Mrs Thatcher

and her champions agree effectively that she is the great weathermaker. They both see her as the

great architect of modern Britain. And in many ways, I wonder if that's a bit overstated. It's

sort of quite old-fashioned history to think of a great man or great woman in this case,

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