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 Philip Dodd, and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Discussion Program from BBC Radio 3,

which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers.

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A new year. A moment when we often brood on the past, as well as imagine what we want to take

into the future. Well, in a way, that's our ambition in this free-thinking programme,

to chew over the relationship between arts and the present and their relationship to the past.

That great poet T.S. Eliot put it rather more sophisticatedly in the 1990 essay entitled

Tradition and the Individual Talent,

published three years before the wasteland that poem of exhausted traditions.

Tradition cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour.

It involves in the first place the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable

to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year. And the historical sense involves a

perception, not only of the pastness or the past, but of its presence. The historical sense

compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones,

but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer,

and within it the whole of the literature of his own country,

...