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.
Agronomist who led Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde toward independence and was killed before it came
Trained as an agricultural engineer, he turned his knowledge of rural poverty into a guerrilla movement against Portuguese colonial rule, building…
Left Paris success to paint the poor of India and died at twenty-eight, days before her first big show
Feted in Paris at nineteen, she chose to go home to India and paint village women with an honesty no one had attempted, then died suddenly in Lahore…
A typist from Hull who flew solo to Australia in a second-hand biplane with a hundred hours of experience
She learned to fly at weekends, qualified as Britain’s first woman ground engineer, and in 1930 flew 11,000 miles from Croydon to Darwin in nineteen…
Fled war-torn China with almost nothing and built one of the first word processing empires
Born in Shanghai, he arrived in the United States after the Second World War with little money and no connections, earned a Harvard doctorate, and…
Burned over a third of her body in a household fire, she came back to win two world titles
An Olympic 800 metres medallist who suffered terrible burns in an accident at home while seven months pregnant and lost her baby, she returned within…
Built the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then spent twenty years fighting the state that gave him everything
The physicist behind the Soviet H-bomb turned against nuclear testing, then against the system itself. He lost his privileges, his medals and his…
A bobbin boy on a dollar a week who became the richest man in the world and gave it all away
His family fled Scottish poverty for Pittsburgh when he was twelve. He built the biggest steel company on earth, crushed a strike at Homestead in…
Opened one small shop in Brighton and built a global business that put ethics first
With a £4,000 loan and no business training she opened The Body Shop in 1976, refilling bottles because she couldn’t afford new ones. It grew into a…
First woman to reach the North Pole over the ice, then the first to cross Antarctica
A dyslexic schoolteacher from Minnesota who struggled through school, then walked and skied to both poles and across the whole of Antarctica with a…
Reported the war in Chechnya from the ground for seven years until she was shot in her own lift
A journalist for Novaya Gazeta who documented torture, disappearances and the killing of civilians in Chechnya, she was detained by troops, poisoned…
The crane operator whose sacking started the strike that became Solidarity
An orphaned farm servant turned welder, she was fired from the Gdańsk shipyard five months before retirement for organising a free trade union. The…
A 54-year-old banker who quit a top job to build a bank from scratch on a phone
After thirty years inside big banks she decided they could not be fixed from within and founded Starling in 2014. Her co-founder walked out with most…
Almost deaf, she classified a third of a million stars by eye and gave astronomy its alphabet
She lost most of her hearing as a young woman, spent a decade at home after college, and then found at Harvard the work she was made for. The…
A Lancashire mill girl who became the only working-class woman in the suffragette leadership
She started in a cotton mill at ten and lost a finger to the machinery. A heckle at a Liberal rally in 1905 sent her to prison and turned her into…
Left her husband and children in Boston and cycled around the world for a bet and a new name
A Latvian-Jewish immigrant and mother of three who, in 1894, set off to become the first woman to cycle around the world, funding the trip through…
Spent his last years living in his workshop, building a cathedral he knew he would never finish
A sickly child who missed school and studied plants instead, he graduated as either a madman or a genius, in his professor’s words, and devoted his…
Made the worst journey in the world for three penguin eggs and spent his life asking what it was for
Too short-sighted to be accepted, he paid his way onto Scott’s last expedition, survived a winter march in temperatures below minus 60, and wrote the…
The greatest mathematician of antiquity, killed by a soldier while working on a problem
He calculated pi, explained the lever and buoyancy and defended his city with machines. Much of his work survived only because a monk scraped it off…
The consul who signed visas for days without stopping in June 1940 and lost everything for it
Portugal's consul-general in Bordeaux defied his own government to issue visas to thousands of refugees fleeing the German advance. Salazar stripped…
Tortured in court to test her word, she went on to become the most successful woman painter of her age
Raped by her tutor at 17 and put through a humiliating public trial, she left Rome, became the first woman admitted to the Florentine academy and…
The first Black man to win Wimbledon, who spent his final year fighting for people with AIDS
Barred from the courts of his home city as a boy, he won three Grand Slam titles, then after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion used his last…
Built a portable heart monitor because rural Cameroon had almost no cardiologists
A young engineer troubled that a colleague's father died of a heart condition that could have been caught early, he designed a tablet-based device…
Thrown from a moving train and left on the tracks, she climbed Everest on a prosthetic leg two years later
A national-level volleyball player who lost her leg after robbers pushed her from a train in 2011, decided in hospital to climb Everest, and reached…
Fell silent for nearly eight years, then returned with a music so simple the censors did not know what to do
A Soviet Estonian composer censured for modernism and then for religion, he stopped composing for most of a decade, studied medieval chant, and…
