Great Lives

Lessing wrote not about poverty, but literary poverty – what happens when eager minds are deprived of books

His fans love his humour, his cheerful self-deprecation, his gritty gentleness, his ability to make sense of the brittleness of the world

The Thai duty-free magnate bought Leicester City and brought it the most unlikely title in English football history

Discouraged by the sexism she’d suffered in mountain climbing circles, Tabei took matters into her own hands

It was a dedication to nature and equality that led to Sankara’s bloody removal

It was Emilie who organised the move of their factory to Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia, one which would lead to the saving of 1,200 lives

From The Man From UNCLE to NCIS, the Scottish actor defied typecasting to become a global star and a fixture of television history

The guitar took Jimi Hendrix to stratospheric heights; first as a backing musician for the Isley Brothers and Little Richard, then to swinging London

When he won the presidency promising “the Chilean path to socialism”, the US immediately registered him as a profound ideological threat

For pretty much his entire life, Mendes was either in style or on the verge of being back in vogue, such is the world’s enduring love of Brazilian music

From a backyard shack in Kingston, Perry reinvented the idea of the recording studio – before burning it to the ground

Considering the battles that raged within her, perhaps the thing about the singer that commands most respect is not her genius, but her persistence

When Nazism came to her adopted home of France, the New Zealand journalist became a leading member of the resistance

An unashamed member of the educated liberal elite, he parlayed his wit and access into a career of TV interviews and debates

The singer left the most famous soul label in music history almost as quickly as she’d arrived

She witnessed extreme horror. The photographs she took and the words she wrote both made and broke her

The German-American went from a sniper to an academic with a reputation for sexual frankness

Very few people have ever been famous the way Armstrong was. He released music almost every year from 1923 to 1970, selling four million records

It’s hard to convey just how big a deal Dunlop was to his fans, and to the people of his homeland. His modesty elevated the level of affection tenfold

The writer shared a deep, collaborative friendship with his kindred spirit Adolfo Bioy Casares, who became his literary double

His life took him from the blood-stained cellars of Texas to a place in the sporting pantheon

The modest aristocrat was perhaps aware that she wasn’t the only woman who went the extra mile in the jungles of Indochina

The Japanese invasion of China, the D-day landings, the founding of Israel – no war was too small for Capa, no battlefield too bloody

Mocked for speaking English with a Clouseau-esque accent, Lufbery’s time in American fatigues saw him become a wartime legend

A force of nature, Barclay was a boulevardier who made music and love with equal enthusiasm

However his works might have been assembled and whatever dissembling he did when talking about his life, Jerzy Kosiński was a master storyteller

A serious artist, the Austrian actress made the fatal mistake of failing to live up to something she had never been in the first place

That he remained upbeat despite his many misfortunes was amazing. That he managed to make his home country laugh for over half a century borders on the miraculous

In common with so many of the great pioneers, the inventor could add to his own gifts the blessing of a truly formidable spouse

He was one half of Milli Vanilli. So was he a failure, a fraud – or an extraordinary success?

The Frenchman always stressed that he was a writer of science fact, not science fiction

It was while the 22-year-old Germaine Lefebvre was walking down a Parisian street that her life was forever changed