Great Lives

City boss Dame Helena Morrissey champions the life of Rachael Heyhoe Flint, the pioneer of women's cricket.

Regarded as a ground breaker, Baroness Heyhoe Flint ruffled feathers and shook up a male dom…

Constance Markievicz led an amazing life - a leading figure during the Easter Rising of 1916, she was the first woman elected to Parliament though she never took her seat.

Markievicz was born into a w…

Nicholas Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, among other positions, and former Chief Economist at the World Bank.

He is also a massive boxing fa…

How many people realise the impact Elsie Widdowson had on the way we view nutrition?

She was a food scientist who devoted her life to improving the diets of adults and children in Britain and abroad.…

Novelist Tracy Chevalier discusses the life of Mary Anning with Matthew Parris.

Mary was a working class woman from Lyme Regis who discovered full dinosaur skeletons on Dorset's Jurassic Coast and sol…

In 1968 Norman Lewis wrote an article called Genocide in Brazil. The photographs that accompanied it were by Don McCullin.

Lewis later said that this one piece of journalism was the great achievement…

Actress Maxine Peake nominates her working class hero, Ellen Wilkinson, as a great life.

Ellen is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of British radical left politics. She jo…

Stephen Fry nominates his hero PG Wodehouse, a writer who he says simply cheers him up like no one else.

Fry wrote to his hero when he was a schoolboy and his most treasured possession is a signed ph…

Peter Williams - founder of British retail chain, Jack Wills - nominates Steve Jobs as his great life.

For Williams, despite the fact that Steve Jobs was an abrasive and difficult person, it was his …

There were so many hoaxes in Andy Kaufman's brief career that for years his fans believed that he wasn't really dead.

Kaufman's best known as Latka Gravas in the American TV sitcom Taxi, and his life…

Twice Queen of England and mother of two kings, but have you heard of Emma of Normandy?

Doyenne of Whitehall and Westminster journalists, Sue Cameron names William the Conqueror's aunt as her great l…

For Steven Knight, the screen writer and director of ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Taboo’, it was easy to nominate his great life. For him there was just one choice, his all-time hero Sitting Bull.

As a youn…

American-born Peaches Golding OBE - Bristol's former Lord Lieutenant and first black female High Sheriff - nominates African American politician Shirley Chisholm who ran unsuccessfully for US Presi…

Strictly Come Dancing's Anton Du Beke chooses the golf legend Arnold Palmer as his great life. Along with the sports broadcaster John Inverdale, he sets out the reasons why Palmer left a legacy far b…

Since her death in 1997, it's been fashionable in some quarters to decry the work of Mother Teresa among India's poor.

Fellow Albanian - opera singer, Ermonela Jaho, offers an alternative view of the…

Germaine Greer nominates sculptor Dame Elizabeth Frink

She was best known for striking sculptures ranging from horses and goats, to wild eagles and disembodied heads.

As a female sculptor working in a…

Gary Kemp, songwriter and guitarist with hit 1980s band Spandau Ballet, chooses the architect and designer Edward William Godwin as his great life.

Gary began collecting pieces of Godwin's work as so…

Chris Patten, Lord Patten of Barnes, nominates a great life who was born a peasant and became a Pope.

Pope John XXIII did well at school but was no star. He wasn't a striking figure of a man and stru…

Len Goodman's great life was one of the biggest figures in creating British musicals and pop music in the 1960's.

The writer and lyricist behind the hit musical Oliver, knew everybody who was anybody…

In 1914, a self-taught Mathematics student named Ramanujan left India for Trinity College Cambridge.

Here, alongside the celebrated English mathematician GH Hardy, he completed some extraordinary work…