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.

Hello.

Hi.

Howdy.

It's a wonderful thing the human voice is so much fun to play with.

Eric's Enchenviles' choral work, Shadow at this evening's prom, explores its possibilities in music.

But together with my guest this evening, I want to listen to the voice in literature. Joining me on stage to think

about the cacophony of narrators in contemporary fiction is writer Richard Beard, author of novels

including acts of the assassins and Lazarus is dead, and whose memoir, The Day That

Went Missing, has just won the 2018 Penn Ackley Prize. And to give voice to our

narrators this evening is actress Fenella Woolgar. Richard, before we listen to our first narrator

this evening, we often hear authors saying that the novel came to them when they heard the voice

of the narrator. What do we mean when we talk about the voice of a novel?

Well, every novel, every piece of fiction, has a narrative voice.

It's one of the few ingredients you can not imagine going without in a fiction.

And it is the point of access to the story itself.

So the point of access to the fictional world. And in the end, what it is,

is it's the composite of all the choices made by the writer, and that would be the choices of

vocabulary that they use, the structure that is imposed on the book, the way characters

are introduced. All these things need to be done through

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