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.
Fought his own government for five years to be allowed to build a mobile network
Refused a licence to launch a mobile phone company in Zimbabwe, he took the state to court and won a landmark ruling that its monopoly was…
Ridiculed at 24 by the most famous astronomer alive, he was proved right and won the Nobel Prize at 73
On the voyage from India to Cambridge he calculated that heavy stars must collapse without limit. Eddington ridiculed the idea to his face. Fifty…
Lost a leg at sixteen and returned to the stage three years later on a rubber and wood prosthetic
A promising Bharatanatyam dancer whose leg was amputated after a bus crash and a botched treatment, she learned to dance again on a Jaipur foot, then…
Drove secret agents to their planes at 19, then spent her life on Europe's forgotten survivors
A wartime volunteer with the Special Operations Executive, she stayed on in ruined Europe to help displaced people nobody else wanted, and turned her…
Grew his mother's one-room Dubai school into the world's largest private education company
Born to Indian immigrant parents in Dubai, he took over the small school his mother had founded for expatriate children and built it into GEMS…
Voted illegally in 1872, was fined 100 dollars, and never paid a cent
A Quaker schoolteacher who spent fifty years travelling the United States for women’s suffrage, was arrested for voting, and died fourteen years…
Won Indonesia its first ever Olympic gold medal, in a sport just added to the Games
A badminton prodigy from West Java, she won the first women's singles Olympic title when the sport debuted in 1992, triggering street celebrations…
Taped thousands of ordinary Soviet voices and turned them into books that dictators tried to bury
A provincial reporter who interviewed hundreds of Soviet women about their war, then the mothers of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and the people of…
Walked on the seabed at 381 metres tethered to nothing, and has spent seven thousand hours underwater
A marine botanist who led the first all-women team to live underwater in 1970, set a depth record in a pressurised suit, and now campaigns to protect…
Broke with her famous mother to fight for working women in the East End and against fascism in Ethiopia
A trained artist who gave up painting to organise the poorest women in Bow, she was expelled from her mother’s movement, jailed for sedition, and…
Trans activist and veteran of the Stonewall uprising who fought for the homeless and the poor
A homeless teenager of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent who took part in the Stonewall uprising, she spent her life fighting for transgender…
Won 11 Paralympic golds from a wheelchair and then took the fight into the House of Lords
Born with spina bifida in Cardiff, she became Britain's most successful wheelchair racer, winning 16 Paralympic medals and six London Marathons…
Spent alternate years herding sheep in Lesotho, and became one of Africa's most cited chemists
She went to school one year and looked after the family flock the next. Decades later she was leading research into dyes that can be switched on by…
Ran to school barefoot, won the New York Marathon, then used running to make peace between cattle raiders
A Pokot girl who was told not to run, she became the first African woman to win a major marathon and set world records, then built a foundation using…
Reached the summit of Everest on his seventh attempt
A Sherpa who ran away from home as a teenager to be near the mountains, he tried Everest six times over twenty years before standing on top with…
Won three Olympic heavyweight golds and turned down millions to fight Muhammad Ali
A sugar worker's son who became the first boxer to win three Olympic golds in the same weight, he refused every offer to turn professional and stayed…
Wrote her dreams on paper, buried them in a tin, and dug them up decades later
Married at eleven and denied schooling as a girl in rural Zimbabwe, she eventually earned a doctorate in the United States and used a television…
Ran a marathon a day across Canada on one leg to raise money for cancer research
Three years after losing his leg to cancer at 18, he set out to run across Canada. He covered 5,373 kilometres in 143 days before the disease…
Became the first woman to lead an Indian missile programme in a field almost entirely run by men
Raised by a widowed mother in a fishing town in Kerala, she studied engineering against expectation and rose through India's defence research…
A Japanese doctor who decided Afghanistan needed water more than medicine and dug a canal
He went to Pakistan in 1984 to treat leprosy and opened clinics in Afghanistan. When drought struck in 2000 he put down his stethoscope, learned…
Set out for China, got as far as the East End, and never turned a destitute child away
A would-be medical missionary who found children sleeping on London rooftops and opened a home for them in 1870. By his death his homes had taken in…
Rode 35,000 miles gathering the evidence that ended the British slave trade
He wrote a prize essay on slavery as a student, then realised he believed it. For the next fifty years he did the unglamorous work: interviewing…
A Leicester preacher who organised one train trip and invented the package holiday
A cabinet-maker and temperance campaigner, he chartered a train in 1841 to take 500 people eleven miles to a rally, and from that single excursion…
An old sea captain who spent 17 years begging London's great to save its abandoned babies
A blunt, unfashionable shipwright who was appalled by infants left to die in the streets. His petition for a Foundling Hospital took nearly two…
