Great Lives

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a Roman general best known for his military victories, but he also helped rebuild Rome, providing aqueducts, statues and the original Pantheon. Nominat...

Matthew Parris invites a fellow Radio 4 presenter into the studio to nominate a Great Life. Dr Sian Williams, who as well as a broadcaster is a counselling psychologist chooses Ann...

Matthew Paris is joined by the pianist and broadcaster Keelan Carew, who nominates the Great Life of the early 20th century composer Nicolai Medtner.It’s often the case that in a w...

Born Joan Molinsky in 1933, Joan Rivers shot to fame on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, who she later infuriated by hosting a late night chat show of her own. Comedian and wri...

Johnny Green was a hippy, a driver, a writer, a father and the road manager of The Clash. He wrote about this experience in a memorable book, A Riot of Our Own. Then he found a new...

Christine de Pizan was born in Italy but most of her life was spent in Paris, where her father was astrologer to the King of France. After her husband died she was left alone to b...

After a childhood in care in Surrey, Alex Wheatle was moved to a hostel in Brixton aged fourteen. Later he was involved in the riots and given a prison sentence, events which were ...

"It was brilliant to read some of the old techniques the Spitfire test pilots were using, and in some respects test pilot flying isn't that different today, but we don't have to do...

"Postgate's work is deep inside me and I think that's true for so many of my generation...His work represents nothing less than a touchstone for our national imagination and in tha...

Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, chooses the writer Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath was a precocious, prize-winning child,. Her mother had high expectations for her. Her father had di...

"One of the things that she claimed was that her mother had been impregnated by the sun god Amon-Ra." Elizabeth Day's interest in the female pharaoh Hatshepsut was sparked by a tri...

"The area I mostly work in is generally known as free - the free music area. And free is one of those four letter words, like rock or jazz or punk maybe. It started out meaning som...