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.

This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Shahid Abari, and welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast for BBC Radio 3.

I don't want knowledge. I want certainty.

Hello and welcome. Just in case you didn't catch the words, David Bowie was singing, I don't want knowledge, I want certainty.

An arresting phrase, which he borrowed from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. In 1967, Russell said

he believed human beings longed for certainty over knowledge. Which would you choose? And what about

my guest tonight? The novelist Salman Rusty and Lionel Shriver, the science writer Marcus Chowne,

and the historian Rachel Hewitt. Do you long for certainty or are you a cooler cat than that,

Salman? Are you happy to be unsure? I think I've got cooler as I got older. When I started out,

when I was writing, I needed to know kind of everything.

I needed to have a lot of architecture and so on.

Otherwise, I couldn't do it.

And now I'm much more prepared to kind of wing it, see how it comes out.

You're fly by the seat of your pants, man.

I'm getting the seat of the pants is getting more work, yeah.

Lionel, are you happy to linger in the grey zone of ambiguity?

I thrive in confusion.

Certainty is comforting but boring.

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