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.
Managed London slum housing tenant by tenant and co-founded the National Trust
Working from the age of fourteen after her father's bankruptcy, she showed that slum housing could be run decently, trained women to do it, fought…
Born in the shadow of Chernobyl and adopted from an orphanage, she has medalled in four Paralympic sports
Born in Ukraine with severe birth defects and left in institutions for seven years, she was adopted by an American woman, had both legs amputated,…
Kidnapped as a child, bought his own freedom and wrote the book that turned Britain against the slave trade
By his own account seized from an Igbo village at about eleven, he survived the Atlantic crossing, saved for years to buy himself out of slavery, and…
A village carpenter whose workshop burned down twice and who made toys because nobody was buying houses
Widowed with four sons during the Depression, he turned from building houses to carving wooden ducks and yo-yos in Billund, and named the little firm…
Operated on a fetus still inside the womb, and its tiny hand gripped her finger
A Nigerian-born pediatric and fetal surgeon who pioneered operating on babies before birth, including a widely seen 1999 photograph of an unborn…
Gave up painting at twenty-two, wrote unpublished for seven years and was later put on trial for what he said
A failed painter from a declining Istanbul family who shut himself in a room to write for years before anyone would print him, he won the Nobel Prize…
Built a capital city in the desert, was driven into exile by a coup and kept designing until 104
The architect of Brasília's curving concrete palaces, he lost his commissions and his country after the 1964 military coup, worked in Paris for years…
The safe, conservative archbishop who became the voice of El Salvador's poor and was shot at the altar
Appointed because he would not make trouble, he was changed by the murder of a friend and spent three years reading out the names of the disappeared…
A Nazi profiteer who spent his fortune bribing officials to keep 1,200 Jews alive
A womanising, hard-drinking businessman and Nazi party member who came to occupied Kraków to get rich, and ended the war bankrupt, having used his…
Self-taught docker turned novelist who learned film-making at forty to reach Africans who could not read
Expelled from school at fourteen, he unloaded ships in Marseille for a decade, wrote novels at night, and in his forties went to Moscow to learn…
Took off her shoes and waded into a pond to win the US Open, and started a generation of golfers
A 20-year-old rookie who won two majors in her first season on the American tour, her barefoot shot from the water in 1998 inspired a wave of South…
Sold into a brothel as a teenager, she became the first Chinese woman shown in French collections
Orphaned young and sold into a brothel by an uncle, she was bought out by a reforming official who became her husband, then trained as a painter in…
The first Nepali woman on the summit of Everest, on her fourth attempt, who did not come down
Told by officials and sponsors that a Nepali woman had no place on Everest, she tried three times, reached the top in April 1993 and died on the…
Congo's first elected prime minister, ousted and killed within months of independence
A former postal clerk and beer salesman who rose through Congolese nationalist politics to become the country's first prime minister, he was…
A Harlem doctor who noticed Black patients went blind twice as often, and invented a laser to remove cataracts
The daughter of a subway motorman and a domestic worker, she became the first Black woman to complete an ophthalmology residency in America and in…
Built hospitals in rural Haiti and Rwanda on the principle that the poor deserve first-class medicine
Raised partly in a bus and a boat in Florida, he went to Haiti as a student, co-founded Partners In Health and spent his life proving that…
Led the Bristol Bus Boycott that helped bring Britain its first race relations law
A young youth worker who, in 1963, set a trap to prove a Bristol bus company would not hire Black crews, then organised a four-month boycott that the…
A bricklayer's son who found families living on a rubbish dump in Madagascar and built them a town
An Argentine priest of Slovenian refugee parents who in 1989 began organising the scavengers of the Antananarivo dump to quarry stone and build brick…
A shoeshine boy who won the World Cup at 17 and twice more after that
He learned the game with a sock stuffed with rags in a poor town in Minas Gerais and became the only player to win three World Cups, scoring in his…
Lost her home on a sinking barge and published her first novel at sixty, winning the Booker at sixty-three
A brilliant Oxford graduate whose adult life fell apart around an alcoholic husband, a houseboat that sank and years of teaching in crammers, she…
A meticulous surveyor whose search for a lost city ended in the Amazon and never explained itself
A British surveyor who mapped remote South American borders for years, then vanished with his son in the Amazon searching for an ancient city he…
Denied a professorship for his race, he made cortisone affordable and was firebombed for buying a house
The grandson of an enslaved man, he started college at high-school level, earned a doctorate in Vienna and synthesised drugs from soybeans that…
A Halifax road mender who left school at 13 and invented the cat's eye that guides drivers through the dark
A labourer's son who repaired roads for a living, he patented the reflective road stud in 1934 after a near miss on a foggy hill. The wartime…
Read about two students jailed for a toast to freedom and founded Amnesty International
A London barrister who, in 1961, wrote a newspaper article asking readers to write letters on behalf of forgotten prisoners. Within a year it had…
