Great Lives

"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 everything by noteb...

12 Jan 27min

"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 that sense it's profoun...

3 Nov 202527min

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 died when she was 8 (b...

27 Okt 202527min

"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 trip to Egypt less than...

20 Okt 202527min

"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 something." Derek Baile...

13 Okt 202530min

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 manager of Celtic FC ...

6 Okt 202527min

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 a part of the Britis...

29 Sep 202526min

"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 a teacher, mapmaker,...

22 Sep 202527min