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.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

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John LeCare's name dominates spy fiction over the last half century.

His geopolitical range is extraordinary.

It covers the fierce secret combat of the Cold War and its impact on the societies who fought it,

as well as the Russia of Perestroika,

Latin America's skirmishes with American power, the moral quandaries of drug companies in Africa,

and most recently the ethical dilemmas thrown up in a turbulent world.

It's 50 years since Le Carre gave us his absorbing, compromised world of espionage in the spy who came in from the cold,

with its cast of flawed and opportunist characters robed in the grandeur of the Cold War.

That and the many novels that have followed have won him a global audience of devoted readers,

many in countries previously behind the Iron Curtain,

which once separated his best-known character

Smiley in his lair at the circus from his enemy, the Soviet spy chief Carla. Le Carre hasn't been shy

of commenting on real-life events either since the fall of the Berlin Wall as a vocal critic of

American and British policy in the War on Terror.

His latest novel, A Delicate Truth, takes us into the ethical conundrums of intelligence

in a world more complex and arguably more unsettling than the divisions of superpower strife.

Please welcome John McCarray and our reader John Shrapnel.

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