Great Lives

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...

Chris Tarrant chooses one of the great pioneers of modern radio. He's the man born Maurice Cole in Liverpool in 1944, who found fame on TV as Gizzard Puke, Cupid Stunt and Sid Snot: Kenny Everett. Kenny's life was almost as bizarre as the characters he played, but it is for his work as a DJ that Chris Tarrant selects him. Tarrant was at London's Capital Radio for 20 years. Kenny Everett began his...

The DJ and broadcaster Bobby Friction champions the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. He is the first Great Lives guest to have named a child after his nominated hero. Galileo was born on 25th February 1564, in Pisa. He was a best-selling author - the Stephen Hawking of his day - who challenged Aristotle's view of the cosmos and was brought before the Inquisition. The presenter is...

"I remember seeing him sitting on the bishops' bench, and I went to him and said, George, I believe you are going to make a speech. He replied, yes I am. I said, George, there isn't a soul in this House who doesn't wish you wouldn't make the speech ..." Lord Woolton, 1944 George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, was the most famous churchman of his day. His brave speech attacking the allies' bombing tac...

Gardener Carol Klein's great life is a Victorian hero of the wild garden, the writer and horticulturalist William Robinson. Matthew Parris presents, with expert help from Robinson's biographer Richard Bisgrove and reader Stephen Hogan. William Robinson was a radical and persuasive writer and designer whose influence on British gardens has been compared to that of William Morris on interiors. You m...

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on the Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley, whose shocking originality he compares to that of Alexander McQueen. Laurence's first foray into art was copying Beardsley drawings to sell at his school - with the more erotic ones fetching a premium price... Biographer Matthew Sturgis fills in the detail of Beardsley's short but extraordinary life, and Matthew Parris presents. Pro...

Max Mosley nominates the philosopher and proponent of personal liberty, John Stuart Mill, as his great life. With presenter Matthew Parris and biographer Richard Reeves. Max Mosley trained as a barrister and was an amateur racing driver before becoming involved in the professional sport, latterly as president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. The youngest son of Sir Oswald Mosley,...