Private Passions

Leslie Cavendish left school at the age of 15 years, without any artistic qualifications, and decided to become a hairdresser. Within three years, his clients included Terence Stamp, Keith Moon, the Bee Gees, Jane Asher – and the Beatles.

He began by cutting Paul McCartney’s hair - and soon became part of the band’s inner circle. He attended Beatles recording sessions and joined them on their Magical Mystery Tour....

Thirty-five years ago, during the Gulf War, the face of the RAF navigator John Nichol appeared on news bulletins around the world. His Tornado jet had been shot down over Iraq, and he was captured, tortured and paraded on Iraqi television.

Together with the pilot John Peters, he wrote about these experiences in their best-selling book Tornado Down. Since then, he's written many more books about military history, on topics ranging fr...

Ruth Ozeki won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022 with her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. The judges called it a ’complete joy to read.’ She’s also a film-maker and a Zen Buddhist priest, and her books draw on her Japanese-American heritage. They also convey her deep concern for our environment, taking on topics such as industrial agriculture, ocean pollution and mass consumerism. Her most...

Jeremy Vine is one of the most familiar voices and faces in British broadcasting. He's presented his Radio 2 lunchtime show since 2003, and its mixture of music and news reaches 6 million listeners every week. Their personal stories and opinions are a vital part of the programme.

Jeremy also presents a weekday show on Channel 5, and since joining the BBC almost 40 years ago, he's been our correspondent in Africa and appeared on eve...

Like many writers, Sofka Zinovieff draws on her own history in her books – and her family tree offers plenty of inspiration. Her paternal grandmother was born into Russian high society, fled to England after the 1917 revolution and became a Communist. Sofka wrote her biography.

Her maternal grandmother married the eccentric aristocrat Robert Heber-Percy, and for a time shared a house with his lover, the artist and composer Lor...

The writer Simon Barnes has two very public passions - sport and the natural world. He wrote about both for The Times for 30 years, covering seven Olympic Games and six World Cup finals, while also delivering columns on short-eared owls, mountain hares and “the organ-pipe contact call of lions."

His books include reflections on the meaning and the soul of sport, and numerous titles about birds, including the best-selling How ...

Margaret Busby is a publisher and editor who's helped change our literary landscape. She's been lauded by the writer Zadie Smith as the cheerleader, instigator, organiser, defender and celebrator of black arts, something she's done for nearly 60 years.

She started young - she was just 23 years old when she co-founded the publishers Allison and Busby with Clive Allison in 1967. Free from the usual industry rules and with little mone...

The historian Michael Wood has shared his enthusiasms and expertise with television viewers and readers around the world for almost five decades.

He’s brought us complex individuals such as Alexander the Great, pivotal conflicts such as the Trojan War, and national histories, including the Story of India, the Story of China and a people’s history of Britain.

And here on Radio 3, he’s one of the distinguished histori...

James Aldred is an Emmy award-winning documentary wildlife cameraman and filmmaker who has collaborated with David Attenborough on projects such Planet Earth, The Life of Mammals and Our Planet. He often finds himself suspended from ropes or on platforms high up in the rainforest canopy, capturing shots of rarely-seen animals and birds, including orangutans, gibbons and eagles.

He recalled some of his treetop adventures - and the ma...

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu has dedicated her career to studying nanoparticles, finding ways to carry medicines to parts of the body that are notoriously hard to reach, such as the back of the eye and the brain, while causing fewer side-effects.

She’s Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London, President of Wolfson College Cambridge and was appointed a DBE in the King’s New Years Honours List ...

Dietmar Mueller-Elmau is the owner of Schloss Elmau, a resort hotel in the Bavarian Alps, 60 miles from Munich. It was set up in 1916 by his grandfather, the philosopher and writer Johannes Müller. He wanted people to take “a holiday from the ego” and to enjoy classical concerts.

Over the decades, it hosted performances by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin and Alfred Brendel. Dietmar continues that tradition,...

The American writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths creates poetry that resonates with music: she writes about her mother cleaning the house while ‘Pavarotti trembled across the terse sunlight of every room.’

As well as poetry, she’s written a novel, and her most recent book is a memoir called The Flower Bearers. It deals with loss, including the sudden death of her closest friend. She received the news on what should have ...

Francis Spufford is an award-winning writer who loves to inhabit different worlds and vividly bring them to life: Golden Hill, which won the Costa First Novel Award, takes place in Manhattan in 1746, Light Perpetual begins in a Woolworths in South London in 1944 and Francis’s latest novel ‘Nonesuch’ is a historical fantasy set during the Blitz.

But it wasn’t until he was 52 that Francis felt confident enough...

Sir Ian Blatchford has been the Director of the Science Museum in London for more than 15 years – the longest serving director in its history.

He also oversees the National Railway Museum in York, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, Locomotion in County Durham, and the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire - all enjoyed by more than four million visitors last ye...

The American writer George Saunders won the 2017 Booker Prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s a moving exploration of the grief of President Lincoln as he mourns his 11-year-old son Willie – and it’s voiced by the weird and wonderful spirits trapped in the cemetery.

George was 58 when the novel was published. In the decades before that, he won renown and awards as a master of the short story. He&r...

The writer and film-maker Penny Woolcock can’t be pigeonholed: she’s worked as a director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and made a film about warring drug gangs on the streets of Birmingham.

A passion for storytelling has driven her career, along with a rebellious streak, perhaps because she’s something of an outsider and never went to university or film school. She often uses non-professional actors in her...

Peter Hamlyn is the founder and president of the Brain and Spine Foundation, after working as a neurosurgeon for 40 years.

He is perhaps best-known for saving the life of the boxer Michael Watson, who suffered a severe brain injury during a title fight in 1991 and was in a coma for 40 days. Peter performed seven brain operations and became a pioneer in the field of sports medicine, campaigning for better care for athletes.

He is no...

Asif Khan is a world-renowned architect and designer whose work inspired a recent headline – ‘is there anything Asif Khan can’t transform?’.

His current projects include the re-invention of the former Smithfield meat market into the new London Museum, working with Stanton Williams and Julian Harrap Architects, and the extensive renewal of the Barbican Centre. Further afield, in Kazakhstan, he’s turned...

Philippa Gregory has been called the ‘Queen of Historical Fiction’. The English royal court has inspired many of her best-selling titles, and she’s written sixteen novels about the Plantagenets and Tudors. One of them – The Other Boleyn Girl – became a BBC TV drama and a Hollywood movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

This success probably surprised her A level teachers: she says she f...