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.

We like a challenge on Radio 3, and we're not afraid to tackle the big subjects,

even in a program that goes out during the interval.

Some people might say, well, all I can manage it in the interval is a tub of rum and raisin,

but we're going to set our ambitions a bit higher.

We're going to get to grips with two of the biggies, sex and death, and how they're represented in literature. And I'm looking at the packed space here at the Bight Hall and thinking, we've got

just the right audience to do it. And we have just the right panelist, too. Belinda Bauer is here. Golden

Dagger-winning crime writer, an author of the heart-stopping new thriller Snap, long-listed for this

year's Booker Prize. And Patricia Dunker is here, too. She's worked in the thriller form.

She's also an academic who's published on French pornography and Muriel Spark, and she's written a red-hot short-story collection called Seven Tales of Sex and Death, which you'll read from today. Now, sex and death are pretty fundamental. Along with birth, that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks, as T.S. Eliot memorably said, in fragment of an agon. Why, Belinda,

are they so difficult to write about? Because we don't know anything about them. I mean,

obviously, none of us have yet died. And although most of us have probably had sex, it's very

difficult to actually quantify what sex means even to ourselves,

let alone to understand what it means to everybody else around us.

They're essentially mysterious then.

They're mysterious things.

Patricia.

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