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 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.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Barbers, whether as wily as Figuero or as murderous as Sweeney Todd,

have long held a special place in European culture.

And to tell us just why barbers are a cut above,

we have the critic and historian Catherine

Hughes, who is busy researching the Victorian body and medical historian Alan Withie.

Alan is midway through a three-year study of the rise and fall of facial fuzz from 1700

to the near present.

It's an enormous subject, so we're going to keep it short, back and sides.

We're taking our cue from the Barber of Seville and focusing on the role and politics of men's hairstyling in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Alan, let's start with you, Just how political could facial hair be?

In fact, very political. We've actually got in Jeremy Corbyn, the first leader of a British political party with a beard since Keir Hardy in 1908.

But you'd be hard put to it to find many bearded MPs at the moment in the Houses of Parliament.

We go back to around about 1850, 1860, it was a rogue's gallery of them,

I mean they all had beards and moustaches and whiskers and so on.

But a century before that, about the only politician you'll find with any facial hair

was a man called Charles James Fox, rather sort of swarthy character, unfortunately described

by his own father as resembling a monkey when he was born, who was lampooned for his facial hair.

So poor Jeremy today is not the first politician to be lampooned for his political facial hair.

Catherine, could you give us some of the highlights of bearded history in the West, beards growing in and out of fashion? Yeah, I mean, it's really extraordinary, isn't it? When you think of certain periods in history, there's periods where everybody's clean-shaven, as Alan said, and then there's periods where everybody appears to have whiskers. The moment, I think, there's often these

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