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, 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 is some level of genius. It also helps

it. 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.

Hello, few of us can resist a bit of gossip. So how about this? She's not received in general society,

and the women who visit her are either so emancipate as not to mind what the world says about them,

or have no social position to maintain. Who could it be? Hillary Clinton, Kate Moss, Beyonce.

Well, no, actually, it's the great Victorian novelist George Eliot making waves in 19th century Germany.

She visited the country more than once, and her presence, as you've just

heard, rarely went unnoticed. Her first visit in 1854 was a kind of honeymoon, but what

scandalised polite society was the fact that her partner, George Lewis, was a married man.

George Eliot's trips to Germany were more than a public flouting of convention, however.

She was drawn to the country by her intellectual curiosity and a sense of affinity,

and this is what we're going to explore tonight with the novelist Patricia Dunker

and the literary historian Claire Walker Gore, who's one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers.

Now, Patricia, your novel, Sophie and the Sybil, is an imaginary account of the time that George Elliott spent in Germany

just before the completion of Middlemarch, her great novel.

What was it about Germany that drew her there?

I think there are quite a lot of sexual refugees in British literature

who make off for the continent

because their scandals seem less dramatic

when they're surrounded by European scandals.

I think the thing that drew George Eliot to Germany initially was actually

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