Great Lives

Astrologer and performer Russell Grant discusses the life of legendary composer Ivor Novello, whose romantic fantasies enchanted audiences in the early 20th century. Joined by Richard Stirling, an expert on Novello's work, they explore the complexities of his career, from his early days as a chorister to his Hollywood fame. Topics include Novello's enduring influence on music and theatre, his relationship with his mother, and the societal challenges he faced during wartime. Their conversation reveals a unique blend of admiration and melancholy surrounding his legacy.

Dr Lucy Worsley chooses a figure as familiar as she is unknown, the great champion of Victorian nursing, Florence Nightingale. Known as 'the Lady with the Lamp' for her work in the Crimea.Born in 1820 into an upper middle class family, Florence experienced early life as a bird in a gilded cage and suffered frequent 'nervous collapse'. Prodigiously intelligent, she was also deeply religious, and at 16 declared she had heard the voice of God, calling her to nursing. By her thirties, and despite opposition from her family, Florence had succeeded in training as a nurse. She was working in a Harley Street establishment for the care of gentlewomen when Britain and France joined Turkish forces against the Russians in the Crimea. As reports came in of the men's suffering, she became convinced of her ability to help.Commissioned by the War Office, Florence set sail for the Crimea in 1854, and her work there quickly became well known. Walking the corridors with her lamp, she was adored by the men for her determination to spare them the diseases like cholera and typhus that were decimating their numbers. But she was as steely as she was compassionate, and ran her troop of nurses with a military discipline. In Britain her reputation grew.By the time of her return two years later, Florence was a reluctant celebrity, frail and ill. While her mother and sister basked in her glory, Florence retreated from the limelight, and for some years was bed-bound. It's now believed she had brucellosis, an illness contracted through infected milk, which leads to depression and severe pain. Yet this did not stop her engagement with medicine, and even from her bed she was instrumental in changing the way that healthcare was implemented both in the Army, and in society at large. Statistics was key to this, and a passion for Florence, who saw in the gathering of data, the evidence of God's patterns at work. She also famously established a school for nursing, and professionalised nursing work.Dr Lucy Worsley, television historian, writer and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that looks after buildings including Hampton Court and the Tower of London, joins Matthew Parris to discuss the complex background of 'the Lady with the Lamp'. And biographer Mark Bostridge explains why Nightingale has a right to be regarded as a great genius of the Victorian age.Producer: Lizz PearsonFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.

Edmund de Waal chooses a writer he believes is one of the greatest of the modern age - Primo Levi, author of the Periodic Table. Born in 1919 in Turin, Levi was an Italian Jew, one of the few deported to Auschwitz who would escape alive.Primo Levi's account of his time in the camp, If This Is a Man, made him one of the first writers to document the Holocaust and it established his name around the world. But Levi was not just a writer. He was a chemist, which gave him the skills that helped save his life in Auschwitz. It was also a day job he never gave up, and his passion for science remained a life-long pursuit.After the War, Levi returned to Turin, married, had a family and wrote books in his spare time. He also became an enthusiastic letter-writer, corresponding with a new generation of Germans, to help them better understand the effects of the Nazi regime. Yet from his youth, Levi suffered from depression. In 1987 he took his own life, throwing himself down the stairwell in the house where he'd been born.Ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal joins Matthew Parris to discuss how Levi's work inspired The Hare With Amber Eyes - his own memoir of his family's history as Jews in 19th and 20th century Europe. And biographer Ian Thomson, one of the last to interview Levi, explains why we shouldn't confuse Levi the writer with Levi the man.Producer: Lizz PearsonFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.

John Cooper Clarke, poetry's Punk Laureate, nominates Salvador Dali, the surrealist behind melting clocks, lobster telephones, and that trademark moustache.Matthew Paris asks whether Dali was a genius artist or just a gifted marketeer of his own brand image, who latterly embraced commercialism."Both" comes the resounding answer from his champion John Cooper Clarke and the art historian Professor Dawn Ades, who recalls meeting the artist when just she just rang his doorbell in Figueres, Catalonia, back in 1968. Producer: Mark SmalleyFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.

Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts champions the life of Liverpool’s football manager Bill Shankly.In the 1960s, Bill Shankley took his team from division two to become one of the world's greatest sides. Famous for his quip that "football is not a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that", Shankly lived and breathed football; but in his later years he felt that the Liverpool managers had frozen him out of the side he had nurtured, and betrayed him.Shankly came from humble beginnings. After school he worked down the local coal mine until the pit was closed. He never became rich and lived in a modest semi-detached house where Liverpool fans were always welcome. His life was a far cry from that of today's top managers, but through his canny playing of the transfer market, did he anticipate their methods? Matthew Parris chairs the discussion, with the aid of Shankly biographer Stephen Kelly.Producer: Jolyon Jenkins First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2013.

Broadcaster and writer Gyles Brandreth nominates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as his "Great Life". Matthew Parris chairs, assisted by biographer Andrew Lycett.Conan Doyle is best known as the creator of the pipe smoking, deerstalker wearing, Sherlock Holmes. Yet this irritated him, and he tried to kill off the great detective, only to bring him back by popular demand. But Conan Doyle was a footballer, cricketer, skier, a campaigner against the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and most startlingly, a practising spiritualist who also believed in fairies.The paradox of Conan Doyle's life was that, having invented the most rational, cerebral fictional character of all time, he himself embraced superstition and behaved in ways that caused even his allies to despair of his credulity.Producer Jolyon Jenkins First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2013.

Dr David Livingstone was the Victorian equivalent of an astronaut - a man who ventured into the  interior of Africa to report on territory that was wholly unknown to Europeans. In this programme, the explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell explains why he admires his predecessor. Matthew Parris chairs the discussion, assisted by Dr Sarah Worden of the National Museum of Scotland.Livingstone went to Africa as a missionary but succeeded in making only one convert, who soon lapsed. Frustrated, he switched his focus to exploration, crossing southern Africa from east to west and back again. He discovered the Victoria Falls, but his attempts to reach the interior by going up the Zambezi were a disaster when he discovered that the rapids he had been warned about were impassable. On his recommendation, missionary families came out from England to settle in what is now Malawi but - as he should have anticipated - many of them died of disease.Despite these failures, he was and is regarded as a hero. As a self-made man who put himself through university on his wages from working in a cotton mill, he embodied the Victorian can-do spirit. His map-making, natural history observations, facility with languages and sheer endurance in the face of overwhelming obstacles made him a formidable character. Above all, his legacy in helping to end the east African slave trade mean that he is still revered in Africa today.Produced by Jolyon Jenkins.First broadcast on Radio 4 in 2013.

Chris Tarrant chooses one of the great pioneers of modern radio.He's the man born Maurice Cole in Liverpool in 1944, who found fame on TV as Gizzard Puke, Cupid Stunt and Sid Snot: Kenny Everett.Kenny's life was almost as bizarre as the characters he played, but it is for his work as a DJ that Chris Tarrant selects him. Tarrant was at London's Capital Radio for 20 years. Kenny Everett began his career in pirate radio, from where he was sacked. He also worked for the BBC, from where he was sacked. He made one appearance on Radio 4's Just a Minute, famously talking about marbles. Other employees included Radio Luxembourg and Capital.Presenter Matthew Parris reminisces about the Young Conservatives invitation to Kenny Everett to join them on stage in 1983 - his slogans included 'Let's Bomb Russia' and 'Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away' - while biographer James Hogg fills in some of the details of Everett's complicated personal life.Producer: Miles WardeFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2013.

The DJ and broadcaster Bobby Friction champions the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. He is the first Great Lives guest to have named a child after his nominated hero.Galileo was born on 25th February 1564, in Pisa. He was a best-selling author - the Stephen Hawking of his day - who challenged Aristotle's view of the cosmos and was brought before the Inquisition.The presenter is Matthew Parris, with additional contributions from Dr David Berman from Queen Mary University of London. Together they discuss whether Galileo should have stood his ground and refused to recant, or if he should be recognised as someone whose experimentation helped define what science is.Produced by Perminder Khatkar.First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.

"I remember seeing him sitting on the bishops' bench, and I went to him and said, George, I believe you are going to make a speech. He replied, yes I am. I said, George, there isn't a soul in this House who doesn't wish you wouldn't make the speech ..." Lord Woolton, 1944 George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, was the most famous churchman of his day. His brave speech attacking the allies' bombing tactics in World War Two is justly remembered here by Peter Hitchens as one of the clearest, most coherent and measured statements ever made about the war. But his contemporaries did not see it quite the same way. "Don't let's be beastly to the Germans," sang Noel Coward, in part inspired by Bell's anti-war stance. But George Bell was not a pacifist - he just believed that the British should not be as barbaric, as he saw it, as the Nazis who had provoked the war. In his speech Bell said, "... to justify methods inhumane in themselves by arguments of expediency smacks of the Nazi philosophy that Might is Right." The controversy surrounding the tactics of bomber command remain alive today. Peter Hitchens is a columnist on the Mail on Sunday, and was once described by a contemporary as a 'deeply compassionate man with the air of a propher about him; and like all prophets, doomed to be scorned by so many'. The programme discussion also includes Andrew Chandler, director of the George Bell Institute; and the presenter Matthew Parris. The producer is Miles Warde.First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.