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, I'm Shahid Abari.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast, which is recorded

with an audience before one of the concerts in this year's BBC proms.

This is the BBC.

Hello, today we're turning our gaze northwards, traveling beyond the confines of the Imperial College Union,

beyond the M25, beyond the Watford Gap, and on towards the dark winter skies of the far north.

The object of our quest, the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights,

nature's most spectacular light show. I'm Eleanor Rosamond Barraclough, and as a historian,

my research into all things Viking and Arctic often takes me to the chilly northern latitudes where this display can be enjoyed.

But if you've never been lucky enough to witness it for yourselves, let me conjure it up for you

by channeling that most remarkable of Arctic explorers, Norwegian badass Fritiof Nansen.

So during his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1893,

he saw more than his fair share of the Northern Lights,

but he was never failed to be blown away by them.

And he wrote,

Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic Night.

It is Dreamland, painted in the imagination's most

delicate tints. It is colour etherealised. One shade melts into the other so that you cannot tell

where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms, it is all faint, dreamy colour music, a far away long drawn-out

...