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, 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 everyone. Great to see you here. I'm Nandini Das, Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University and one of BBC's New Generation thinkers.

Welcome to storm and fire and brimstone and much gnashing of teeth.

For 2,000 years, the Bible's visions of the beginning and the end have

fueled our imaginations, and it's the same potent cultural cocktail everywhere around the world.

Joining me for an enjoyable discussion of chaos, doom, and gloom and weeping prophets is Salivikas, the author of Ms. Garnet's Angels, Mr.

Golightly's holiday, where three roads meet and the librarian. And also literary scholar

and BBC New Generation thinker, Joe Moshenska. Joe, chaos is a pretty overused word, isn't it? We tend to use it pretty much whenever we are talking about anything that goes wrong, from trains to traffic, essentially. But what's chaos really like on a biblical scale? Well, one place the word chaos is not overused is in the Bible, where it doesn't appear at all, at least in the

King James version. It's a Greek word. But certainly the idea of chaos, which we find in the

Bible, is a very interesting one, those wonderful resonant, evasive verses from the opening of Genesis

that talk about the earth being without form and void,

and everything that's created emerges from this formlessness, this kind of shapeless place.

And so I think, whereas we tend to think of chaos, as you say, as something that represents a state of decline, things falling apart, I think if we look back to the Bible, you have a sense

of things emerging from this chaotic,

pre-created space, which is in a sense more hopeful, but that also means they can return there.

They could, that everything can fall apart, that everything can end and return from whence it came.

And you talked about chaos coming from Greek ideas, and that's something that, Sally, you've been thinking about as well.

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