Great Lives

“Henrietta's eyes looked into one's soul at the same time exposing her own. She posed for me most Mondays for the last seven months until two days before she died.” In a raw and very funny opener to t...

5 Maj 202527min

The legendary opera star Maria Callas was lauded for her magnetic stage presence and extraordinary vocal range. Born in New York in 1923 to Greek immigrant parents, she moved with her mother and siste...

29 Apr 202527min

Born in Illinois in 1941, Dana Meadows studied Chemistry and Molecular Biology, before turning her back on a post doc position at Harvard, to pursue environmentalism. She joined her husband Dennis Mea...

9 Apr 202527min

George Harrison was a musician, singer and songwriter who became one of the most famous people in the world as one quarter of the Beatles. That alone would merit a place in the Great Lives pantheon, b...

3 Mars 202527min

John Gay, eighteenth-century satirist and author of The Beggar's Opera, is nominated by the writer Jake Arnott - whose novels, including The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, are also set in London's cr...

3 Mars 202527min

One dubbed "the biggest, loudest and indisputably the rudest mouth on the battleground", Florynce Kennedy was a force to be reckoned with. She was a lawyer, a vocal figure in the American civil rights...

24 Feb 202527min

"I've chosen him because I think he was possibly the most interesting human being who has ever lived". AN WilsonBorn in the middle of the 18th century in Frankfurt, Goethe went on to become the preem...

17 Feb 202527min

"The Queen Boadicea, standing loftily charioted, Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like, Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters in her fierce volubility": so wrote Alfred, ...

10 Feb 202527min