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 char...

12 Apr 201128min

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...

5 Apr 201126min

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 try...

1 Feb 201128min

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 ...

25 Jan 201128min

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 year...

18 Jan 201128min

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 ...

4 Jan 201128min

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 e...

28 Dec 201027min

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 co...

21 Dec 201028min