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.
A refugee pedlar with no English whose market stall became Marks & Spencer
He arrived in Leeds in the early 1880s with almost no money and no English, sold from a tray around the villages, and in 1884 took a market stall…
Considered himself a sculptor, hated painting, and spent four years on his back under the Sistine ceiling
A stonecutter’s foster child who fought with popes, worked in filth and pain for years on commissions he resented, and was still chiselling marble…
Never left his small Piedmont town, and turned his father's hazelnut paste into Nutella
He took over his family's small confectionery shop in Alba, Italy, after the war, refined a cheap hazelnut and cocoa paste born of wartime chocolate…
Fed the Frank family in hiding for two years and saved Anne's diary from the floor
An office worker who brought food, books and news to the eight people hidden in the Amsterdam annexe, and who gathered Anne Frank's scattered pages…
Orphaned by Partition and jailed as a thief, he became independent India's first great athlete
He saw his parents killed in the violence of 1947, survived in refugee camps by stealing, was rejected by the army three times, and went on to win…
Led the peaceful campaign for votes for women for more than fifty years and lived to see it won
She joined the suffrage movement as a teenager and led its largest, law-abiding wing through decades of defeats, insisting that patient argument…
Went bankrupt twice making sweets, then built a chocolate town and left it all to orphans
With a fourth-grade education and two failed businesses behind him, he finally succeeded with caramels, then gambled everything on milk chocolate.…
Stood at the college gate in Nanjing in 1937 and kept ten thousand women behind her
An Illinois blacksmith's daughter who stayed at Ginling College when the Japanese army took Nanjing and turned its campus into a refuge for women and…
Banned from her own country for three decades, she sang South Africa to the world from exile
A township singer who left for a film festival and found her passport cancelled, she spent thirty-one years in exile, testified against apartheid at…
Began ballet at 13 while living in a motel and became American Ballet Theatre’s first Black woman principal
Told she was too old, too short and the wrong shape for classical ballet, she began training at 13 while her family lived in a motel and rose to the…
Trafficked into Britain as a child, he became the greatest distance runner the country has produced
Brought to London under another child's name and made to work as a domestic servant, he was rescued by a PE teacher who noticed he could run, and…
Built mobile networks across Africa without paying a bribe, then funded a prize for honest leaders
A Sudanese engineer who left a corporate job in Britain to found Celtel, which connected millions of Africans by mobile phone in countries investors…
An Egyptian engineer overlooked at Bell Labs who invented the transistor now inside almost everything
Leading a team of new recruits that senior physicists ignored, he worked out how to seal a silicon surface and then, with Dawon Kahng, built the…
Irish-born organiser who spent her later decades leading strikes of American miners and mill children
Widowed and left destitute after losing her husband and four children to yellow fever and her livelihood to the Chicago fire, she remade herself in…
Left her convent to live among the dying of Calcutta, doubting God for fifty years
A schoolteacher nun who walked out into the slums of Calcutta in 1948 with a few rupees and founded the Missionaries of Charity. Revered and…
Gave up his title and his best years rather than fight in a war he believed was wrong
Stripped of the heavyweight championship for refusing the draft, he lost three and a half years of his prime, came back to regain the title twice,…
Lent 27 dollars to 42 village women and invented banking for the poor
An economics professor during the 1974 famine, he found his theories said nothing to the people starving outside his classroom. Grameen Bank, which…
Escaped captivity to find the Niger flowing the wrong way, then went back and never came home
A Scottish surgeon who survived four months as a prisoner to reach and chart the Niger River, then died on a second, disastrous expedition that…
Scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics at 14 and later fled her country on foot
A girl from a small Romanian town who made the scoreboard in Montreal show 1.00 because it could not display a 10, then lived under surveillance for…
Survived ISIS captivity and told her story to the world so that others would not have to
A Yazidi villager from northern Iraq, she was 21 when ISIS killed her mother and six brothers and sold her into slavery. She escaped, chose to speak…
A civil servant who wrote novels after work, was banned at home, won the Nobel and was stabbed at 82
He worked in Egyptian government offices for nearly forty years and wrote in the evenings, becoming the first Arabic novelist to win the Nobel Prize,…
The Pocket Hercules, who defected from Bulgaria and won three Olympic golds for Turkey
A weightlifter under five feet tall from the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, forced to change his name, he defected in 1986 and became the first lifter…
A village schoolteacher who mapped Tibet in secret by counting his steps on a string of prayer beads
Recruited by the British Survey of India when Europeans were barred from Tibet, he walked over a thousand miles disguised as a pilgrim, fixed the…
A shy student who reached the North Pole alone by dog sledge and vanished on a winter mountain
He rafted the Amazon alone, climbed the highest peaks on five continents, and drove dogs 7,500 miles across the Arctic, always by himself because he…
