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.

Whiston Hugh Orden, the English poet with a face like a Greek riverbed in August, is at the heart and at the margins of our culture.

He's much anthologised and much mythologised. We turn to him when our loved ones die. But we also remember him as a kind of traitor,

the poet who went off to America with his on-off boyfriend Christopher Isherwood

in Britain's wartime hour of need.

Tonight's prom features a work

that was produced under Orden's influence,

Leonard Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety,

a symphonic adaptation of Orden's long and mysterious poem of that name.

And tonight we've gathered two more people who can say,

Orden made me do it.

In 1994, the poet and librettist Glinn Maxwell retraced a journey through Iceland made by Auden in 1936.

Auden took Louis MacNeice, Glyn took Simon Armitage.

And the poet Polly Clark has published an absorbing novel Larchfield

about Auden's time as a teacher in Scotland.

Polly and Glyn, welcome to the programme.

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