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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Tonight, what American primetime TV tells us about the state of the nation,

Pakistan's best-selling novel unveiled, and David Byrne turns the life of Imelda Marcos into an immersive musical.

Music into an immersive musical.

A song from Here Lies Love Too Much, taken from the original concept album, sung by Florence Welsh and written by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim.

But first, Simon Sharma is a prolific historian and broadcaster, best known for his prize-winning work on the French Revolution, America, and the intertwining of history and art.

But one of his books that's unleashed some fierce arguments about his approach to the past was dead certainties.

It's a mixture of fiction and meditation on the unreliability of historical versions,

centred on two interlinked stories.

The first is the death of General Wolfe and the link between personal destiny

and the need to create heroes,

a convenient truth constructed in this case

by Benjamin West's famous portrait

of the heroic death of wolf

at the battle with the French for Quebec.

Dead Certainties is alive and kicking

has just been republished two decades after its

first outing, but in an era of first-person memoirs and deconstruction of narrative history,

...