Great Lives

Professor of Nursing, Laura Serrant, chooses the life of the black, gay poet and activist Audre Lorde who still inspires the women's movement today. She tells Matthew Parris why Audre has meant so much to her both personally and professionally. Professor Akwugo Emejulu of Warwick University is the expert witness.Presented by Matthew Parris. Producer: Maggie AyreFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2018.

Miles Davis - trumpeter, composer, bandleader - is championed by Adrian Utley of Portishead."He's always been really important in my life, right from early on when my dad used to play him. It was part of the atmosphere of our house."From the early years with Charlie Parker via Kind of Blue to playing in front of 600,000 hippies on the Isle of Wight, Miles Davis was a musician who never stood still. "Always listen for what you can leave out," he used to say.Portishead's seminal 1990s album Dummy seems to have taken advice from the man. As Adrian Utley explains to presenter Matthew Parris: "The darkness and the sense of space is the thing that I have assimilated from Miles ... he's in my DNA."With Richard Williams, author of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music.Producer: Miles WardeFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2018.

Comedian, actor and artist Jim Moir aka Vic Reeves chooses the life of Don van Vliet - the Dadesque musician and painter Captain Beefheart who has influenced many musicians since the 1960s. Jim joins Matthew Parris to discuss the bizarre and complex persona developed by the Californian eccentric who died from MS in 2010.With Beefheart's biographer, Mike Barnes. Producer: Maggie AyreFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018.

Gisela Stuart, former MP for Birmingham Edgbaston champions Joseph Chamberlain to be nominated as her great life.But can she really make the case for this former industrialist who made it to the cabinet, but had a knack for splitting political parties and switching allegiances? Jo Chamberlain was first a Liberal then a Liberal Unionist and finally formed an alliance with the Conservative party but fell out with them too. Gisela argues he was a man who wasn't afraid to take action, a radical who shouldn't simply be remembered for his failures but as "the man who made the weather" and for making Birmingham the best governed city in the world.The expert witness is Peter Marsh, Honorary Professor of History at the University of Birmingham and author of 'Joseph Chamberlain, Entrepreneur in Politics.' Presented by Matthew Parris. Producer: Perminder Khatkar.First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2018.

Actor and broadcaster Liza Tarbuck chooses the extraordinary life of the Serbian-American scientist, Nikola Tesla.Nikola founded the Tesla Electric Light Company and was responsible for the introduction of the AC current in America - seeing off competition from his rival and former hero, Thomas Edison. Liza explains to Matthew Parris how his inventions were ahead of their time. Despite the fortunes and misfortunes of this brilliant and eccentric man, he died virtually penniless in a hotel room in New York. With the help of Professor Iwan Morus from Aberystwyth University.Producer: Maggie AyreFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2018.

Herodotus - father of history or father of lies? Matthew Parris introduces a sparky discussion about a writer whose achievements include a nine book account of a war between east and west - the Persian invasions of Greece. Justin Marozzi proposes him not just as an historian, but as geographer, explorer, correspondent, the world's first travel writer, and an irrepressible story teller to boot. Backing him up is Professor Edith Hall, who sees Herodotus as the author of a magnificent work of prose. But Matthew Parris wrestles with whether he was historian or hack.* Justin Marozzi is the author of the award winning Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood. * Edith Hall is Professor in the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London.Herodotus of Halicarnassus - modern day Bodrum in Turkey - wrote about Croesus, Darius, Xerxes and Leonidas, plus the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Pl ataea. His books also embrace much of the rest of the known world.Producer: Miles WardeFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2018.

Helen Arney is a self-confessed science nerd, stand-up entertainer, and once nicknamed a "geek songstress". Matthew Parris discovers why she's chosen Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), the pioneering Victorian physicist, inventor and suffragette, as her great life. Ayrton was the first woman to be admitted into membership of what is today known as the IET, the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Their archivist Anne Locker knows Ayrton's life and works and fields questions from Matthew and Helen. They discuss how Hertha overcame considerable obstacles to be the first woman who was proposed for the fellowship of the Royal Society. Her candidature was refused on the grounds that as a married woman she had no legal existence in British law. This did not stop her from patenting over 20 of her inventions, which included a large electric fan designed to disperse mustard gas from the Trenches during the First World War. Fascinated by electricity, her achievements also ranged across mathematics and physics. Hertha's father was a Jewish immigrant, a watchmaker from Poland, who hawked goods at markets. Nonetheless, Hertha was among the first generation of women to study at Girton College, Cambridge.Helen Arney, who's one-third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, the comedy group that makes science entertaining for audiences, explains why she's championing Ayrton.Producer: Mark SmalleyFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2018.

Former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal was responsible for convicting the men who sexually abused young girls in Rochdale.Matthew Parris invites him to nominate a great life. He's chosen Mahatma Gandhi, also a lawyer, whom he says inspired him to speak out on behalf of those who were marginalised and ignored by the rest of society.Producer: Maggie AyreFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2017.

On a field outside Dublin, Daniel O'Connell met and shot a former royal marine in a duel.John d'Esterre had been outraged when O'Connell, the later hero of Catholic emancipation, described the mainly Protestant Dublin corporation as a 'beggarly corporation'. O'Connell later claimed that he had practised with two pistols every week, knowing that one day he would be challenged to a duel.Nominating O'Connell is the vice chancellor of Oxford and terrorism expert Louise Richardson. It's not the violence of the duel that appeals, but O'Connell's revolutionary way of marshalling huge support for his causes, which were always conducted in a remarkably non-violent way. "The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood," O'Connell said. He took his seat in Westminster in 1830 and thereafter fought for the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the union, a cause in which he failed. Patrick Geoghegan, O'Connell's biographer and special advisor to the new Irish prime minister, adds the colour to a truly extraordinary and important life.Presented by Matthew Parris. Producer: Miles WardeFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2017.

Marcel Duchamp - the father of conceptual art, and responsible for that famously provocative urinal signed 'R Mutt, 1917' - is the great life choice of fellow artist Cornelia Parker.She explains to Matthew Parris why he's influenced not only her work but that of so many other artists since his death in 1968. As an art student in the 1970s she recalls the attraction of Duchamp's 'readymades', such as a bicycle wheel or suspended wine bottle rack - manufactured items that the artist selected and modified, antidotes to what he dismissed as conventional 'retinal art'.They are joined by Dawn Ades, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy. She recalls an occasion when she saw him completely absorbed in a game of chess in a café in the Spanish seaside town of Cadaqués, whilst visiting Salvador Dali. They also discuss Duchamp's intriguing female alter ego, Rrose Selavy (Eros, c'est la vie or "physical love is the life") Man Ray's photographs of whom featured in some Surrealist exhibitions.We hear how Duchamp let the world know that he'd given up being in artist in favour of devoting himself to chess whilst still in his 30s. He played the game at a high level, representing France at international tournaments, whilst covertly continuing his art work. Cornelia Parker explains that his works spoke not just to the Pop Art and Op Art movements of the 1960s, but more broadly to American artists like Bruce Nauman and the composer John Cage, and whose influence can be seen today in the work of, for example, fellow English artist, Rachel Whiteread.Producer: Mark SmalleyFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2017.