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.

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Yesterday was a day of strange meetings, full of unexpected moments.

Two interviews, one with Noam Chomsky, to some commentators, the world's most famous public intellectual.

The other with Anthony Selden,

historian of contemporary Britain and master of Wellington College, a college founded in 1859.

Two very different figures, one profoundly sceptical of authority, another by dintint of his title, its upholder.

Both interviewees upended my expectations at moments.

I had presumed an explosive Noam Chomsky, here to give the Edward Side lecture on the Middle East, spittingly anti-American, capable of manichean judgments of good and of evil.

It turned out rather different.

Noam Chomsky is now 84, and he came initially to prominence over 50 years ago as a major new voice in linguistics.

But from the 1960s onwards, he has become a, perhaps

now the dissenting voice in the US, damning his country for what he sees as its crimes,

from Vietnam to its support of Israel. Noam Chomsky comes from an activist American Jewish immigrant family, so

no surprise how he has developed. But what is arresting is a sentence in an early

1967 essay, Resistance, where he speaks of his innate distaste for activism.

Odd for an American whose global reputation rests exactly on his activist writings and actions,

I said, when we met in a small bedroom in some pancreas hotel in London yesterday.

If the world would go away, I'd be happy to do work that's intellectually challenging and exciting,

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