Great Lives

DJ Deb Grant picks US mailman turned country-folk singer John Prine, whose beautiful songs captured the world in which he lived. Bob Harris, who first met him on the Old Grey Whistle Test, adds to t…

Seretse Khama was born in 1921 in Bechuanaland when it was still a British Protectorate. In 1966 he became Botswana's first president. In between he married a white Londoner, Ruth Williamson, was exi…

The chef Raymond Blanc nominates his mentor and friend, the physicist Professor Nicholas Kurti. Kurti was born in Hungary but fled to Oxford when Hitler came to power. Pushing the frontiers of low-te…

At the age of 10 Dervla Murphy was given an atlas and a bicycle, and so began an adventurous life. Her account of a journey to India became a classic called Full Tilt but she also went to Cuba, Ethio…

We don't even know if Ned Ludd was real, but perhaps that was the point. "You could say he was everyone and no one - and that's what made him so terrifying for the authorities." Leader of the Luddite…

Richey was, beautiful says Cummins, a natural icon and a gift to photograph. He also believes his writing has been overshadowed by the fact of his disappearance in 1995. "I think nobody has looked be…

Biography show in which the guest picks someone they admire. Benny Hill is a thorny choice but playwright Jonathan Maitland is determined that - despite accusations of sexism and racism later in his …

“Henrietta's eyes looked into one's soul at the same time exposing her own. She posed for me most Mondays for the last seven months until two days before she died.”

In a raw and very funny opener to …

The legendary opera star Maria Callas was lauded for her magnetic stage presence and extraordinary vocal range. Born in New York in 1923 to Greek immigrant parents, she moved with her mother and sist…

Born in Illinois in 1941, Dana Meadows studied Chemistry and Molecular Biology, before turning her back on a post doc position at Harvard, to pursue environmentalism.

She joined her husband Dennis Me…

George Harrison was a musician, singer and songwriter who became one of the most famous people in the world as one quarter of the Beatles. That alone would merit a place in the Great Lives pantheon, …

John Gay, eighteenth-century satirist and author of The Beggar's Opera, is nominated by the writer Jake Arnott - whose novels, including The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, are also set in London's c…

One dubbed "the biggest, loudest and indisputably the rudest mouth on the battleground", Florynce Kennedy was a force to be reckoned with.

She was a lawyer, a vocal figure in the American civil right…

"I've chosen him because I think he was possibly the most interesting human being who has ever lived". A N Wilson

Born in the middle of the 18th century in Frankfurt, Goethe went on to become the pre-…

"The Queen Boadicea, standing loftily charioted, Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like, Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters in her fierce volubility": so wrote Alfred,…

Eugene Victor Debs, born 1855 in Indiana USA, was a railway worker, a trade unionist and a five time candidate for the presidency. He was imprisoned during the First World War for sedition. He'd urge…

"Make the boy interested in natural history," wrote Captain Scott from his tent in the Antarctic. He was talking about his son, three year old Peter Scott, whom he never saw again and who went on to …

Margot Fonteyn was an icon: a ballerina who helped build and indeed embodied the traditional image of a dancer, just as the artform was finding its feet on the British cultural scene.

From humble beg…