Great Lives Folgen

How many people realise the impact Elsie Widdowson had on the way we view nutrition? She was a food scientist who devoted her life to improving the diets of adults and children in Britain and abroad. Matthew Parris hears why Helen Sharman, the first Briton to go into space, thinks Widdowson deserves her nomination. They are joined by Elsie's friend and biographer Margaret Ashwell, President for the Association for Nutrition.You can download the podcast to hear an extended version of the broadcast programmeProducer: Maggie Ayre.First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2017.

Novelist Tracy Chevalier discusses the life of Mary Anning with Matthew Parris.Mary was a working class woman from Lyme Regis who discovered full dinosaur skeletons on Dorset's Jurassic Coast and sold them to collectors in the early 1800s. Her remarkable finds came before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and she believed them at first to be giant crocodiles, but as scientists began flocking to Lyme Regis to buy her specimens, she started to educate herself in geology, becoming an authority on fossils.However, as with many of the subjects of Great Lives, she was never fully credited for her efforts and faded from public consciousness after her death.With Hugh Torrens, Emeritus Professor of History of Science and Technology at the University of Keele. Producer: Maggie AyreFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.

In 1968 Norman Lewis wrote an article called Genocide in Brazil. The photographs that accompanied it were by Don McCullin. Lewis later said that this one piece of journalism was the great achievement of his life. It led directly to the creation of Survival International and a change in the law relating to the treatment of indigenous people in Brazil. Lewis is known as a brilliant writer - one of our best, said Graham Greene, 'not of any particular decade of our century'. He's best remembered for A Dragon Apparent and Naples '44.Don McCullin didn't travel with Norman Lewis to Brazil, but they struck up an unexpected friendship. He was like my father, the great photographer says. And in Norman Lewis's later years they worked together in Venezuela, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. But McCullin didn't read many of his books. "I struggled through Naples '44" he admits. Yet his admiration for the way Lewis opened his eyes to the world remains undimmed.Recorded on location at McCullin's Somerset farmhouse with Norman Lewis's biographer Julian Evans.Presented by Matthew Parris.Produced at BBC Bristol by Miles Warde. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.