Great Lives Folgen

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.