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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The zoo. It's a place that contains animals. Here be dragons, commodo ones, gibbons too, tigers, penguins, naked mole rats, living unexpectedly urban lives.

London Zoo, ZSL London Zoo, as it likes now to be called,

is an animal colony in the middle of Regents Park, which is itself a kind of colony, the original

gated community for the super rich of Georgian England. The fauna found here are exotic and populous,

but we're at the zoo for a special series of

Nightwaves programmes in order to come face to face with more than just the animals.

Because the zoo contains something else within its tanks and pools and enclosures,

rich history, important ideas, urgent debate.

It's a place to come to talk about what it means to be human, as much

as what it means to be a gorilla, a place to think about the nature of cultural institutions

and our relationship with the natural world. Over the next few weeks, we'll explore the life

of ZSL, the real place where I'm standing now, and the metaphors and ideas that it has

bred. We'll examine Angus Wilson's novel, The Old Men at the Zoo, the greatest work of art

this place has yet to inspire, and we'll ask what happens when you meet the gaze of our nearest

animal relations. Tonight, though, we're going to investigate the evolution of the zoo as an institution,

from private scientific club to visitor attraction and laboratory of conservation. And we'll look

at how the zoo has been a laboratory for something else, experiments in architecture,

...