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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Hello, and tonight we're on board a man-of-war in the English Channel, and up on the mizzen, we can see Billy Budd.

Not the protagonist of Britain's opera, but the

original version, the hero of Herman Melville's novella, which inspired the opera. Melville is now

acknowledged as one of 19th century America's greatest writers, but he was left in obscurity

for much of his life during his lifetime. He had to make ends meet with a job as a customs officer.

And at his death in 1891, Billy Budd was still unpublished. The book's main characters,

Billy himself, Captain Veer, and Claggart, the Master at Arms, are familiar to anyone who knows

the opera. But meeting them in Melville's prose is a revelation,

like being doused by a freshet wave, to borrow a phrase from Melville. Well, to slice the main

brace of the book and of its author, I'm joined by two inveterate Melville fans, Jamila Gavin,

author of the novel Corum Boy, and Philip Haw, whose books include The Sea Inside and Leviathan.

And to read extracts from the novella, we have the actor Peter Marinka.

Billy Budd is now regarded as one of the finest works by Melville,

but the irony is it wasn't actually published until more than 30 years after his death.

How did that come about?

Well, Melville had this extraordinary sort of trajectory of our career because he started out as an absolute bestseller

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