Great Lives

BBC Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox nominates Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes, a hip hop artist and rapper who performed with the band TLC. She burned her lover's house down and TLC went bankrupt. Lisa died in a car accident aged 30, during a documentary shoot. The expert witness is music journalist Jacqueline Springer. Presented by Matthew Parris Producer: Perminder Khatkar First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 20...

Businessman Mark Constantine chooses Lebanese-American author of ‘The Prophet’, Khalil Gibran. With Matthew Parris. Snubbed and practically ignored by the literary establishment in the West, but regarded by millions as a world-class poet his work, The Prophet, published in 1923, has never been out of print and next to the bible is the biggest selling book in America. Businessman Mark Constantine c...

At home in Edinburgh Isabella Bird was the very picture of the ailing Victorian spinster but the moment her tiny feet hit the gangway of a steamer or squeezed into the stirrups of a horse she was transformed. Taking a doctor's advice to travel for the sake of her health Isabella headed for Australia, Japan, Korea and Hawaii before finding her spiritual home amongst the most rotten scoundrels of Am...

Comedian Dave Allen is chosen by Adil Ray, creator and star of Citizen Khan. He explains to Matthew Parris how the legendary Irish comic helped shape his own career. Producer: Perminder Khatkar. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2014.

Writer and comedian David Baddiel chooses the American novelist, John Updike. With Matthew Parris and Justin Cartwright. His novels perfectly captured the shifting moral codes of middle America in the 1970s and 80s but do John Updike's novels still have something important to tell us today? The writer and comedian David Baddiel makes the case for Updike in conversation with Matthew Parris and the...

Award-winning architect Sir David Chipperfield chooses the pioneer of modern architecture Le Corbusier aimed to build a better world through radical buildings and the controversial reshaping of whole cities. Sir David joins Matthew Parris to unpick the life of a man who considered himself a heroic figure, fighting battles to improve the world. With expert witness: Flora Samuel, Professor of Archit...

Matthew Parris is joined by Michael Horovitz who nominates fellow poet and founder of the 'Beat Generation', Allen Ginsberg, as his Great Life. Ginsberg's friend and biographer Barry Miles provides biographical detail of this colourful and controversial writer, who through his battle for free expression inspired American counter culture. Producer: Melvin Rickarby First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in...

The life of the 'Hillbilly Shakespeare' Hank Williams is the choice of Deacon Blue singer Ricky Ross. Williams is regarded as being the prototype rock star and continues to be hugely influential on musicians today despite a short recording career of just six years before he died at the age of 29. Matthew Parris presents. With Nick Barraclough as the expert witness. Producer: Maggie Ayre First broa...

The chanteuse, pianist, composer and civil rights activist Nina Simone is the choice of another female musician who has made a career of defying convention; Joanna Macgregor. Presented by Matthew Parris.

Grace Dent nominates Nancy Mitford for her wit, and for the way in which she showed women that it was possible to live your life fully and unconventionally. Nancy Mitford's greatest success came with the novels The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). Matthew Parris asks what else it is about Nancy that so inspires Grace, with the aid of Mitford biographer Lisa Hilton. Grace D...

"In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable" – so said Winston Churchill on this week's Great Live, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. Many would argue that he was Britain's greatest field commander since Wellington - arrogant, hard to like but undeniably successful – one of the most, perhaps the most, conspicuously successful British commander of the Second World War. He was a national cele...

Trade unionist Sir Brendan Barber nominates American author, John Steinbeck as his Great Life. The author of The Grapes of Wrath aimed to fight the cause of the common man, was derided by the right as a Communist and by the left as a sell-out for supporting the Vietnam war. Brendan picks through the politics and explains how Steinbeck influenced him as a teenager to look towards joining the trade...

From Banking, to air traffic control systems and to controlling the United States defence department, there's a computer language called 'Ada'. It's named after Ada Lovelace – a 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron and now championed as a Great Life. She's been called many things. But perhaps most poetically by Charles Babbage - whom she worked with on a steam-driven calculating m...

Matthew Parris is joined by actor Peter Bowles who nominates George Devine, groundbreaking artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre. Devine battled against the theatrical establishment, repressive censorship, helped the careers of actors like Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, and by discovering writers like John Osborne and other 'Angry Young Men' - he changed British theatre forever. Helpi...

TV journalist and writer Paul Mason talks to Matthew Parris about the 19th Century French anarchist, Louise Michel, heroine of the Paris Commune. They're joined by historian Carolyn Eichner who says that Michel "expounded action and aggression with a theatrical, infectious elegance." Known as 'the Red Virgin of Montmartre', Michel fought on the barricades in the short-lived revolution of 1871. Cap...

The writer Julie Burchill talks to Matthew Parris about the Hollywood star Ava Gardner. They're joined by Ava's biographer Lee Server. Often described as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, Ava Gardner made sixty-five movies, ranging from ‘Mogambo' (for which she won an Oscar nomination) to ‘Maisie Goes To Reno' (for which she didn't). She had three husbands - Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Fr...

Playwright Tanika Gupta chooses as her Great Life, a man who is a hero to Bengali speakers across the World, Rabindranath Tagore. Born in 1861, to a wealthy family in Calcutta, Tagore would be the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work spanning every genre. He was also a humanist, philanthropist, and thinker, whose friends included Yeats and Gandhi. Tagore began writing...

Poet, playwright, and critic Gabriel Gbadamosi chooses as his Great Life the political maverick and inventor of Afrobeat, musician Fela Kuti, and tells Matthew Parris why his work deserves to be better known. Whether withstanding ferocious beatings from the Nigerian police, insulting his audiences, or demanding a million pounds in cash upfront from Motown records, his strength and stubbornness wer...

Astrologer and performer Russell Grant chooses one of the greatest screen legends of cinema's early years – Ivor Novello. Born in 1893 in Cardiff, Novello was also a talented writer and composer. He dominated both screen and stage with his epic romantic fantasies, until his death in 1951. Russell is joined by Richard Stirling, author of the stage biography of Novello, 'Love, from Ivor', and the ad...

Dr Lucy Worsley chooses a figure as familiar as she is unknown, the great champion of Victorian nursing, Florence Nightingale. Known as 'the Lady with the Lamp' for her work in the Crimea. Born in 1820 into an upper middle class family, Florence experienced early life as a bird in a gilded cage and suffered frequent 'nervous collapse'. Prodigiously intelligent, she was also deeply religious, and a...

Edmund de Waal chooses a writer he believes is one of the greatest of the modern age - Primo Levi, author of the Periodic Table. Born in 1919 in Turin, Levi was an Italian Jew, one of the few deported to Auschwitz who would escape alive. Primo Levi's account of his time in the camp, If This Is a Man, made him one of the first writers to document the Holocaust and it established his name around the...

John Cooper Clarke, poetry's Punk Laureate, nominates Salvador Dali, the surrealist behind melting clocks, lobster telephones, and that trademark moustache. Matthew Paris asks whether Dali was a genius artist or just a gifted marketeer of his own brand image, who latterly embraced commercialism. "Both" comes the resounding answer from his champion John Cooper Clarke and the art historian Professor...

Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts champions the life of Liverpool’s football manager Bill Shankly. In the 1960s, Bill Shankley took his team from division two to become one of the world's greatest sides. Famous for his quip that "football is not a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that", Shankly lived and breathed football; but in his later years he felt that the Liverpool mana...

Broadcaster and writer Gyles Brandreth nominates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as his "Great Life". Matthew Parris chairs, assisted by biographer Andrew Lycett. Conan Doyle is best known as the creator of the pipe smoking, deerstalker wearing, Sherlock Holmes. Yet this irritated him, and he tried to kill off the great detective, only to bring him back by popular demand. But Conan Doyle was a footballer,...

Dr David Livingstone was the Victorian equivalent of an astronaut - a man who ventured into the  interior of Africa to report on territory that was wholly unknown to Europeans. In this programme, the explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell explains why he admires his predecessor. Matthew Parris chairs the discussion, assisted by Dr Sarah Worden of the National Museum of Scotland. Livingstone went to...