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.

Tonight, we're pounding the city streets and thinking about how creative minds have found inspiration by trotting on the trottoire and avoiding the cracks as they make tracks.

We'll also venture out into the countryside and see whether swapping brogues for walking boots

works the same sort of magic.

Strolling beside me today are the writer Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneurs, a book about women

exploring cities on foot. And Sean Williams, New Generation Thinker, Wild Ice Skater, and by extension,

an expert on romanticism.

Lauren Elkin, when did you first realize that just walking could be a real inspiration?

I think it was when I moved to Paris to study abroad when I was around 20 years old,

and I was reading, as all young undergraduates in Paris, must,

a really battered copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast.

And he writes about sitting in cafes and writing about everyone he sees. And he's, you know,

like kind of masculine, you know, macho creep, like saying, oh, beauty, you belong to me and so does the city. And so that's not at all how I felt, but I did take a real cue from Hemingway in terms of how I was relating to the city and then how I was transmogrifying that into prose on the page. Well, thank you, Lauren, and Hemingway fans, please feel free to tweet their protests at that. What about you, Sean Williams? Well, our family, my family have always been keen walkers and William Wordsworth

may have written that he wandered lonely as a cloud, but actually his sister Dorothy was along

on the walks with him and today I still like to walk in the Peak District with my sister while

I muse in moments of academic pretension. So then I found an affinity then with the

text that I work on as an academic through my love of walking, really. And trying to avoid

...