Great Lives Folgen

Michael Dobbs champions the life of Guy Burgess - journalist, diplomat and spy. Between 1935 and 1951, Guy Burgess worked for a Conservative MP, the BBC, MI6 and the Foreign Office. Brilliant, flamboyant and apparently shambolic, he also shot like an arrow to the heart of the Establishment and secretly and systematically betrayed its secrets to the KGB. Matthew Parris chairs as Michael explains why he believes that Guy Burgess was a Great Life. Burgess’s biographer Stewart Purvis, who uncovered the only known audio recording of Guy Burgess, is the expert witness. Producer: Julia JohnsonFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.

When Philippa Langley and other members of the Richard III Society helped to discover the body of the king in a Leicester car park, Richard's life once again became a hotly contested debating point. Philippa joins Matthew Parris to defend Richard III as a Great Life, with expert witness and Richard biographer Annette Carson. Can the man who may have been responsible for the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower really be described as "great"? Or was he the victim of Tudor propaganda and Shakespearian slander? Producer Christine HallFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.

Writer Roald Dahl is well known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox and The BFG.Yet he was also fascinated by medical science. Professor Tom Solomon, who looked after him during his last illness, spent hours discussing medicine with Dahl.Tom talks to Matthew Parris about Dahl's life and work, through the prism of his forensic interest in the workings of the human body. With them is Donald Sturrock, Dahl's biographer.Producer Christine Hall. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014.