Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore and London Zoo

Caroline Aherne was born in London on Christmas eve, but her family moved north when she was a toddler. With an IQ of 176, school was easy, so she kept herself busy, mimicking the nuns for the enter...

19 Okt 27min

Edward Osborne Wilson was a pioneer across several fields of biology, from entomology to biodiversity. He is best known for his expertise on ants, his work developing the field of Sociobiology and for...

12 Okt 27min

Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland in 1919, grew up in London and was educated in Bristol and Oxford. She's famous both as a novelist and a philosopher, and she won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea,...

5 Okt 27min

Brian Jacques was a docker, sailor, boxer, trucker, milkman, poet and a folk singer too. Then he wrote his Redwall series of children's fantasy novels and became an overnight forty year success. His b...

28 Sep 27min

Eric Ashby was a quiet pioneer. He lived in the New Forest in the south of England, where he painstakingly filmed the local wildlife, particularly badgers, foxes and deer. His occasional films were in...

21 Sep 27min

Poly Styrene was born Marie Joan Elliot-Said in 1957 and went on to become front woman of X Ray Spex. When Pauline Black first saw her on Top of the Pops, Poly was wearing a red military jacket and ca...

14 Sep 27min

Laurence Olivier, Baron Olivier of Brighton, was born in Dorking in 1907. He's best known these days for roles in films ranging from Wuthering Heights to Spartacus to the ageing Nazi hunter Ezra Liebe...

14 Aug 27min

Naji al-Ali was one of the best known cartoonists in the Arab world. His creation, a little boy called Handala, always stands with his back to the viewer, hands behind his back, watching whatever Naji...

2 Jun 27min