Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
Founded the Red Cross, went bankrupt, vanished for decades and won the first Nobel Peace Prize
A Geneva businessman who stumbled on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859 and organised care for the wounded of both sides. His book led to the Red…
Refused to accept apartheid limits and built a hair care company from his kitchen
Growing up under apartheid with no right to own property in most of South Africa, he built a small hair care manufacturing operation from his kitchen…
A war-scarred medical student who built a village for orphans with 600 schillings and a simple idea
Raised by his elder sister after their mother died, he decided that what war orphans needed was a mother, brothers and sisters, a house and a…
A bricklayer rejected by the ski academy, who crashed in Nagano, won two golds, then nearly lost a leg
Thrown out of ski school at 15 for being too small, he laid bricks for years before racing, survived one of the worst crashes in Olympic history to…
A watchmaker's daughter who mastered the electric arc and was refused by the Royal Society for being married
Raised by a widowed seamstress, she became the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, explained why arc lamps hissed and…
A farm boy with a burned hand who chased the causes of disease from Japan to West Africa, and died there
A childhood accident left his left hand nearly useless. He became a bacteriologist anyway, was right about syphilis and wrong about yellow fever, and…
Trained with water bottles and bamboo in lockdown, then won the Philippines' first Olympic gold
A weightlifter from a poor family in Zamboanga who was stranded abroad during the pandemic, improvised her training, and in Tokyo won the first…
Painted abstract pictures before Kandinsky and ordered them hidden for twenty years after her death
A Swedish painter who made huge abstract canvases from 1906, years before the men credited with inventing abstraction, and left instructions that…
The Chinese consul in Vienna who issued visas to Shanghai in 1938 and never mentioned it
A missionary-educated scholar from Hunan who, as consul-general in Vienna after the Anschluss, defied his ambassador and issued visas that let…
Made The Great Wave at 70, after a stroke and a lifetime of poverty, and thought his real work was still ahead
A Japanese print artist who changed his name thirty times, moved house more than ninety times and produced his most famous images in his seventies,…
Built India's nuclear research programme from scratch, then died in a plane crash at its height
A cosmic ray physicist who abandoned a promising career in Europe to build India's atomic energy programme almost from nothing after independence,…
An Anglo-Irish landowner who spent a fortune persuading small farmers to work together
After years ranching in America restored his health, he returned to Ireland and devoted his life and much of his money to persuading small,…
Took off her veil at Cairo railway station and founded the Egyptian women's movement
Raised in a harem and married at thirteen, she led women onto the streets in the 1919 revolution, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union and won a legal…
Lost both legs in a blizzard at 17 and built himself better ones, then built them for everyone else
A climbing prodigy whose legs were amputated after three nights lost on Mount Washington, he designed prostheses that let him climb harder than…
Ran a student catering business in America before building a Dubai property empire from a trading desk
He funded his studies abroad by running a small catering operation, then built a trading and services company in Dubai before founding DAMAC…
Feigned madness to escape a caliph, then spent ten years under house arrest working out how we see
A thousand years ago he insisted that ideas be tested by experiment, showed that light enters the eye rather than leaving it, and wrote a book on…
Set out from Tangier for Mecca at 21 and did not stop travelling for nearly thirty years
A young legal scholar who left home for the pilgrimage and went on to cross Africa, Arabia, India, the Maldives and China, covering more ground than…
Left a research career in Austria to grow medicine in the Egyptian desert
A pharmaceutical researcher who gave up a settled career in Austria to reclaim a patch of desert outside Cairo, he built Sekem, a farming and…
Jailed without trial by the government he served, he drew in secret and later filled Tate Modern
A Sudanese painter who fused Arabic calligraphy with modern art, he was imprisoned for six months in 1975 on a false charge, drew on scraps in his…
Lost both arms at ten and plays international table tennis holding the bat in his mouth
An Egyptian who lost both arms in a train accident as a boy, was told he could not play table tennis, and taught himself to serve with his foot and…
Chose fencing because its uniform let her compete in hijab, then became an Olympic medallist
Struggling to find a sport whose uniform fit her faith, she found fencing at 13 through a foundation for underserved youth and became the first…
Investigated lynching when it could get her killed, and was run out of Memphis for telling the truth
Orphaned at 16, she raised her siblings and became a journalist. After friends were lynched in 1892, she documented hundreds of killings, lost her…
Swore she would never be a missionary, then three men knocked at the door in one night
Born in India to a missionary family and determined to escape it, she was changed by three women who died in childbirth because no man could attend…
Told doctors to wash their hands and was driven out of the profession for it
He cut deaths in his maternity ward by ninety per cent with a bowl of chlorinated water. His colleagues were insulted, he lost his job, and he died…
