Great Lives

Helen Arney is a self-confessed science nerd, stand-up entertainer, and once nicknamed a "geek songstress". Matthew Parris discovers why she's chosen Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), the pioneering Victorian physicist, inventor and suffragette, as her great life. Ayrton was the first woman to be admitted into membership of what is today known as the IET, the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Th...

Former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal was responsible for convicting the men who sexually abused young girls in Rochdale. Matthew Parris invites him to nominate a great life. He's chosen Mahatma Gandhi, also a lawyer, whom he says inspired him to speak out on behalf of those who were marginalised and ignored by the rest of society. Producer: Maggie Ayre First broadcast o...

On a field outside Dublin, Daniel O'Connell met and shot a former royal marine in a duel. John d'Esterre had been outraged when O'Connell, the later hero of Catholic emancipation, described the mainly Protestant Dublin corporation as a 'beggarly corporation'. O'Connell later claimed that he had practised with two pistols every week, knowing that one day he would be challenged to a duel. Nominating...

Marcel Duchamp - the father of conceptual art, and responsible for that famously provocative urinal signed 'R Mutt, 1917' - is the great life choice of fellow artist Cornelia Parker. She explains to Matthew Parris why he's influenced not only her work but that of so many other artists since his death in 1968. As an art student in the 1970s she recalls the attraction of Duchamp's 'readymades', such...

Goldfrapp's Will Gregory is centre-stage at the Colston Hall in Bristol to tell Matthew Parris why he feels a kinship with Flann O'Brien. The Irish writer's books 'At Swim-Two-Birds' and 'The Third Policeman' are now hailed as literary masterpieces, but only came to prominence after the author's death. Carol Taaffe, who has written about Flann, helps make sense of the man who wrote under three pse...

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 dominated sport. Helena Morrissey makes the case for why Heyhoe Flint is a great life. With Matthew Parris and Dr Raf Nicholson who teaches history at Queen Mary University of London and is a writer on t...

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 wealthy Anglo-Irish family and gained her exotic surname from marriage to a Polish count. She was adventurous, flamboyant, committed to woman's rights, court-martialled and nearly shot. Nominating her...

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 fan and chooses the life of Muhammad Ali to explore with Matthew Parris and sports journalist and boxing commentator Ronald McIntosh. Not only does Stern admire Ali's prowess in the ring, but more so his...

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. Matthew Parris hears why Helen Sharman, the first Briton to go into space, thinks Widdowson deserves her nomination. They are joined by Elsie's friend and biographer Margaret Ashwell, President for th...

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 sold them to collectors in the early 1800s. Her remarkable finds came before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and she believed them at first to be giant crocodiles, but as scientists began flocking t...

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 of his life. It led directly to the creation of Survival International and a change in the law relating to the treatment of indigenous people in Brazil. Lewis is known as a brilliant writer - one of o...

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 joined the Communist party, met Lenin and Trotsky in Moscow and then went on to become one of the Labour Party's youngest people entering parliament in 1924. For Maxine, the tragedy is that Ellen Wilkins...

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 photograph which reads: "To Stephen Fry, All the best, PG Wodehouse." PG Wodehouse was a self-made man, he began as a bank clerk, married a chorus girl and was interned by the Nazis. He wrote some of the...

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 ability to predict what people wanted. It was his Apple products that have touched the lives of so many people world wide and for Peter it's his gadgets that have changed our attitudes to technology. P...

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 was undoubtedly weird. Performance artist, Elvis impersonator, wrestler - he's difficult to pin down. Nominator Iain Lee believes he was a genius, while Olly Double of the University of Kent school of...

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 life. Matthew Parris explores the time 1,000 years ago when England was emerging as a new nation in the decades before the Norman invasion, when the country's Anglo Saxon rulers were beset with Viking i...

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 young boy growing up in Birmingham in the 1970s, Steven was obsessed with stories and tales of Native Indians. At the age of thirteen, Steven searched for pen-pals and ended up exchanging letters with the...

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 President in 1972. Fellow guest Dr Kate Dossett, Professor of American History at Leeds University, describes Chisholm’s contribution to the cause of African Americans and to feminism. Presented by Matthew Pa...

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 beyond the sporting world and far beyond the golf course. Producer: Maggie Ayre First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2017.

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 nun who dedicated her life to running homes in Calcutta and later around the world, providing food, shelter and care for the poor and dispossessed. Despite her hard-line views on abortion and despite...

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 man's world, Elisabeth Frink found it hard to establish herself in the 1950s. To help tell the story of her hero, Germaine Greer is joined by Frink's son, Lin Jammet, and the art critic Richard Cork....

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 soon as he started making money from hit singles. He's remained fascinated by the life and work of the man who formed part of the Aesthetic Movement in the 19th century, designed houses for Oscar Wilde a...

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 struggled to keep his weight under control. There was nothing about him that stood out and his election as Pope took many by surprise. But he was the man who began to push the Roman Catholic church into th...

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, made a fortune and partied with Royalty. But like many who flourished in that era he also lost everything in a blitz of booze, drugs and bad behaviour. Len Goodman makes a case for why he regards Bar...

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 on Pi and prime numbers. What was even more extraordinary was that he couldn't prove a lot of his work, and attributed many of his theories to a higher power. For the renowned UK choreographer Akram...