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Biographies

A–D | E–H | I–Q | R–Z

• Prince Albert Victor
  The first-born son of Edward VII who died at the age of 28.
• Alfred the Great
  The literate Wessex king who dispensed justice and defeated the Danes.
• Salvador Allende
  The ill-fated Marxist president of Chile.
• Idi Amin Dada
  The brutal dictator of Uganda, who died in obscurity in Saudi Arabia.
• Anne of Cleves
  Henry VIII's fourth wife whose marriage was annulled.
• Yasser Arafat
  The role played by Arafat in causing conflict and bringing peace to the Middle East.
• Prince Arthur
  The short-lived elder brother of Henry VIII, whose marriage to Catherine of Aragon had great repercussions.
• Isaac Asimov
  The prolific writer, widely considered a genius and best known for his science fiction.
• Atatürk
  Turkish leader who was instrumental in the dissolution of the Ottoman empire.
• Aung San Suu Kyi
  The Burmese Nobel Prize winner who pursues peace from house arrest.
• Douglas Bader
  Loved and loathed, Bader became a national hero after losing his legs in an air crash only to rejoin the RAF and become the most famous of ‘the few’ in the Battle of Britain.
• Shirley Bassey
  The big-voiced singer from Cardiff's Tiger Bay.
• Margaret Beaufort
  The doting mother of Henry VII who helped him gain the crown.
• Thomas Becket
  Murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, the rest of his life is far less known.
• Thomas Becket
  Henry II’s friend, who turned away from the king with terrible consequences.
• David Ben-Gurion
  Israel’s first prime minister.
• Leonard Bernstein
  The American composer who reconciled popular and classical music.
• John Betjeman
  The high Tory lyricist who was hailed by The Times as 'Teddy Bear to the Nation'.
• Captain William Bligh
  Not a sadistic martinet who provoked the mutiny on the Bounty, but a brilliant navigator and ethnographer.
• Anne Boleyn
  Henry VIII's second wife, for whom he divorced his first and set in train the Reformation.
• Napoleon Bonaparte
  Military genius and passionate lover, revolutionary and emperor, glorious leader or little dictator?
• Napoleon Bonaparte
  The Corsican upstart who became emperor of France and conqueror of much of Europe.
• Boudica
  Follow the life of the British queen who revolted against the Romans.
• Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
  The cuddly queen mother with a will of steel.
• Willy Brandt
  The mayor of Berlin and German chancellor who resigned over a spy scandal.
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel
  The 19th-century engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson were bitter commercial rivals but also lifelong friends.
• Fidel Castro
  The Communist Cuban premier who remains a thorn in the side of the United States.
• Catherine of Aragon
  Henry VIII's first wife, who proved that loyalty means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
• William Cecil
  Elizabeth I’s right-hand man, who supported her even when she looked unlikely to succeed to the throne.
• Prince Charles
  A king-in-waiting who is, according to David Starkey, 'the most effective prince of Wales ever'.
• Prince Charles
  The heavily marketed royal figurehead, sidelined by a new generation of celebrity royals.
• Charles I
  The monarch who lost his head because of his belief in the divine right of kings.
• Charles II
  Charles I’s heir, he returned to England after nine years’ exile to preside over the Restoration.
• Princess Charlotte
  The only child of the prince regent, whose death in childbirth eventually led to Victoria’s accession to the throne.
• Winston Churchill
  A selection of the best sites about the 'Greatest Briton'.
• Winston Churchill
  Concise biography of the British prime minister from his aristocratic birth to being proclaimed as the ‘Greatest Briton’.
• Winston Churchill
  The British prime minister whose career began under Victoria and ended in the trendy 1960s.
• El Cid
  The 1961 biopic of the medieval Spanish hero portrayed a man and an age that modern scholarship has left behind.
• Alan Clark
  The historian and MP whose aristocratic charm and self-assurance allowed him to say – or do – what he liked.
• Arthur C Clarke
  This science fiction writer predicted the future so regularly that he won the respect of the scientific community.
• Georges ‘The Tiger’ Clemenceau
  The prime minister who represented France at the Paris Peace Conference.
• Cleopatra
  The true story behind one of world's most enigmatic characters.
• King Cnut
  The Danish king who became a bigamist to consolidate his position as English monarch.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  The creator of the first fictional detective to use forensic science to solve crimes.
• Thomas Cranmer
  A favourite of Henry VIII and his heir, this archbishop of Canterbury came a cropper under Mary Tudor.
• Cromwell
  Historian Blair Worden reviews the 1970 film.
• Oliver Cromwell
  Cromwell rose from provincial obscurity to become Lord Protector and the most powerful man in England.
• Oliver Cromwell
  The Parliamentarian leader who tried unsuccessfully to complete the Puritans’ ‘godly revolution’.
• Richard Cromwell
  Oliver Cromwell's son who inherited the position of lord protector but was deposed.
• Thomas Cromwell
  Henry VIII’s thug who ruthlessly carried out the dissolution of the monasteries.
• Aleister Crowley
  Was the self-proclaimed ‘beast 666', just a spoilt rich boy rebelling against a repressive mother?
• John Curry
  The figure skater whose brilliant career was dogged by professional failure and personal tragedy.
• Erich von Däniken
  The former Swiss hotelier who believed that the pyramids were built by humans after extraterrestrials mated with them and gave them an evolutionary kick-start.
• Leonardo da Vinci
  The Italian genius, concentrating on his skills as architect and engineer.
• Da Vinci Detective
  The unsolved mysteries surrounding some of the works of genius produced by Leonardo da Vinci.
• Charles de Gaulle
  The soldier who had an unwavering belief in his destiny as saviour of France.
• Charles de Gaulle
  A concise biography of the French wartime leader and president of France, whose contradictory nature – and championing of France against all comers – made him more enemies than friends.
• Eamon de Valera
  Independent Ireland’s first president, who become the oldest serving head of state.
• John Dee
  Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, Dee inspired Shakespeare and Marlowe.

• Keith Douglas
  A poet of World War II, whose reputation continues to grow, despite (or because of) his early death.
• Sir Francis Drake
  Always associated with the Armada, Drake was a brilliant seaman and ambitious, brave and ruthless in piracy and war.
• Alexander Dubcek
  Slovakian leader of the Czechoslovakian ‘Prague Spring’.

A–D | E–H | I–Q | R–Z

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