Great Lives

The conductor Charles Hazlewood chooses the great American composer Leonard Bernstein, music director of the New York Philharmonic and creator of West Side Story, Wonderful Town, and Candide. The charismatic Bernstein clearly influenced Charles Hazlewood's own choice of career - he's an award winning conductor, made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 2003 and recently presented The Birth of British Mus...

Matthew Parris presents the biographical series in which his guests choose someone who has inspired their lives. Here, Sir Clive Sinclair nominates fellow inventor Thomas Edison. Edison invented sound recording, the electric light bulb and moving pictures, but also had his fair share of duds along the way. Sir Clive invented the first electronic calculator but also the ill-fated C5 electric car. S...

Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah is a passionate advocate of Marcus Garvey, the inspirational black leader of the early twentieth century. Long before Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey was trying against all the odds to give black people a sense of pride, and to create the conditions in which they might hope to flourish and prosper. Kwame Kwei-Armah tells the story of Garvey's incredible r...

The writer Katharine Whitehorn chooses Mary Stott, the great campaigning journalist and the first editor of the Guardian women's page. She's the journalist who more than anyone started the revolution in women's journalism since the 1950s. She gave ordinary women a voice, and a place to get together and share ideas. Liz Forgan, who was to edit the women's page later, shares her memories of working...

Gertrude Bell was a British woman who arguably founded the modern state of Iraq. Explorer, mountaineer and archaeologist, this extraordinarily talented woman travelled widely across Arabia in the years preceding the first world war. When war came, her knowledge of the tribes, geography and politics of the area made her a vital asset to British intelligence. In the wake of British victory in Mesopo...

In his time, Aneurin Bevan was, according to one biographer, "the most colourful and controversial, most loved and most loathed political personality in Britain". The founding father of the NHS is the choice of Lord Kinnock, the former leader of the Labour Party who, like Bevan, grew up in Tredegar, in the heart of the Welsh coalfields, where he met his hero many times. Kinnock regards Bevan as a...

Dance and actor Lionel Blair chooses his friend and dancing partner Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy described himself as a 'one-eyed black Jew' - and he was described by others as one of the greatest all-round entertainers of all time. Lionel danced and sang with Sammy in a dazzling performance on the stage at the Royal Variety Performance in 1961, and he revisits that memory through an evocative archive re...

Business guru Sir Gerry Robinson was born in Ireland but moved to England in his teens, and he chooses Samuel Beckett, another Irishman who lived away for much of his life - in Paris. Gerry, a late convert to Beckett's plays, loves him because he's accepting of the human condition: that we're all locked in this repetitive pattern. We don't want to keep on doing the same thing over and over again,...

DH Lawrence was, in the words of Geoff Dyer, a man with thin wrists and thick trousers. He was also the author of Women in Love, Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover. But poet and performer John Hegley has chosen him above all for the quality of his poetry, an admiration presenter Matthew Parris also shares. Lawrence died aged just 44. An obituary at the time reckoned he was 'a rebel agains...

Malcolm McLaren was the great rock'n'roll swindler, who died in April 2010, aged 64. 'I've been called many things,' McLaren wrote as advance publicity for his one man show, 'a charlatan, a con man, or the culprit responsible for turning popular culture into nothing more than a cheap marketing gimmick. This is my chance to prove these accusations are true.' The man behind the Sex Pistols and Duck...

Satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe nominates Walt Disney. He joins Matthew Parris to discuss the life of a complex cultural icon. With guest experts Brian Sibley and Richard Williams, creator of Roger Rabbit. Gerald spent much of his childhood in his sick bed, so it's not surprising that Disney cartoons and feature films meant so much to him. He can still recall the thrill at the prospect of seein...

Michel de Montaigne is one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and became famous for his ability to fuse intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography. Montaigne's work continues to influence writers to this day. Championing his life is the surgeon, scientist, broadcaster and politician Professor R...

Winston Churchill's is the Great Life chosen by Lord Digby Jones, former Director General of the CBI. Expert contribution comes from Professor David Reynolds. Both men have vivid memories of the day in 1965 when, as children, they heard that Churchill had died. Surprisingly this is the first time that Churchill has been nominated in this long-running series. Considered by many a busted flush in th...

Golda Meir was the Iron Lady of Israeli politics, a straight-talking, intransigent leader who once said, "There is a type of woman who does not let her husband narrow her horizons". She is the choice of former Conservative government minister Edwina Currie. Golda Meir was born in Kiev and educated in the United States, but moved to Palestine her twenties, just after the First World War. One of the...