Great Lives

Jock Stein, first British football manager to win the European Cup, picked by composer Sir James MacMillan and aided by Jock Stein’s biographer, Archie MacPherson. Jock Stein was m...

Matthew Parris heads to the house where Benjamin Franklin lived for almost 17 years to meet banker and philanthropist John Studzinski.Franklin was born in Boston when it was still ...

"I find his novels extraordinarily beautiful .. and they're an excellent length."Miles Jupp picks an author he loves, but knows little about. JL Carr was born in Yorkshire and was ...

Today's great life is possibly more famous as a Shakespearean character - King Richard II who was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. He's been chosen by historian Hel...

DJ Deb Grant picks US mailman turned country-folk singer John Prine, whose beautiful songs captured the world in which he lived. Bob Harris, who first met him on the Old Grey Whis...

Seretse Khama was born in 1921 in Bechuanaland when it was still a British Protectorate. In 1966 he became Botswana's first president. In between he married a white Londoner, Ruth ...

For over a hundred years no one thought too much about the origins of the RSPB, but among its founders was a woman in Didsbury opposed to the use of feathers in fashionable hats. E...

Rock Icon Tina Turner proposed by the actress and author Rebecca Humphries. Tina Turner began life as Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, joining Ike Turner's band in St Louis...

The chef Raymond Blanc nominates his mentor and friend, the physicist Professor Nicholas Kurti. Kurti was born in Hungary but fled to Oxford when Hitler came to power. Pushing the ...

At the age of 10 Dervla Murphy was given an atlas and a bicycle, and so began an adventurous life. Her account of a journey to India became a classic called Full Tilt but she also ...

We don't even know if Ned Ludd was real, but perhaps that was the point. "You could say he was everyone and no one - and that's what made him so terrifying for the authorities." Le...

Richey was, beautiful says Cummins, a natural icon and a gift to photograph. He also believes his writing has been overshadowed by the fact of his disappearance in 1995. "I think n...