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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On tonight's nightwaves Ian Banks the Wasp Factory. We remember the novelist who died last week

by talking about his first and most eerie novel. Also later, the War of the wombs between the Israelis and the Arabs, but first...

Memory had planted a hunger in me. I was starving. I would always crave more, to know more,

to remember more, to number the world higher and higher, nothing would ever be enough.

A couple of lines from the novelist Harry Kunzru's contribution to a new exhibition entitled

Memory Palace, and its memory which we want to corral now, something the Greeks so revered

that they rolled it together with wisdom into one goddess.

Now that we're outsourcing so much of memory to technology, whether Google or the mobile phone,

there are some who think that our ability to remember is diminishing.

On the other hand, we are an increasingly memorialising culture. Just think of the

forthcoming four-year celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the first world.

Or perhaps, to misquote the Great Gatsby, which is this year's literary film blockbuster,

our loss of confidence in the future drives us towards the past.

Well, to talk about memory, both personal and collective, we have in the studio the actor Edward Petherbridge, who suffered a stroke,

but then remarkably still remembered his lines as King Lear, the award-winning historical novelist Lawrence Norfolk,

and down the line the psychologist Juliana Matsoni,

who studied people who can forget nothing at all.

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