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 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, you are all a lost generation declared Gertrude Stein of the people who had lived through the Great War.

Though she was an American who was living in France, her idea of the lost generation has haunted Britain for much of the last century, not least because some 700,000 men from these islands died during the conflict. Yet myths have built up too around that generation.

One myth is that they were all utterly opposed to the war. Another is that the war was purely

about the British Isles. In fact, millions of empire troops also fought in the trenches.

Tonight's prom includes music by George Butterworth, one of the best-known artists

killed during the Great War.

And we'll be talking about that lost generation of which Butterworth was a part.

To discuss what's myth and what's reality, I have with me tonight two guests. The writer

Helen Dunmore, and her most recent book, The Lie, examines the devastation caused by World War

1 in a Cornish community. And Simon Heffer is a distinguished journalist and historian, whose most

recent books are high minds and strictly English.

Simon, we're focusing tonight on some of the myths and realities surrounding the Great War and that lost generation.

And I wonder if, as a historian, there's one particular myth

that you'd most like to explode or undermine.

Well, we've heard a lot about the squalor and horror of the trenches,

which I wouldn't dream of understating. But my father, who fought in the Great War, confirmed something that the historian

Corelli Barnett wrote in his tetralogy, the collapse of British power, where he said that

when young men joined the army in 1914, in many cases, it was the first time they had slept in their

own beds. It was the first time they had been properly fed and the first time they'd been properly

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