Is Matthew Parris the modern Plutarch? Radio 4's Great Lives reviewed

Whenever I listen to Great Lives on Radio 4, which is often, I am reminded of the gulf between fame and achievement. How is it that some people do so much, yet remain obscure, while others seem to be carried forward with perpetual momentum after doing just one thing? A good many of the lives dissected on the programme over the years have been completely unfamiliar to me. I’ll spend the half hour puzzling over why they are not better known.

Where would we be without Great Lives? There is minimal appetite in trade publishing for books about esoteric figures. And just imagine pitching a biopic of Hertha Ayrton, Eleonora Duse or Jayaben Desai to Hollywood today. Radio is probably the only place left for forgotten souls. Great Lives keeps going because the public is comparatively adventurous and willing to take a risk.

Recently, Matthew Parris joined writer and illustrator Nick Hayes on his houseboat to discuss the conservationist, canoeist and ‘English gentleman anarchist’ Roger Deakin. In the course of his life – he died in 2006 at the age of 63 – Deakin worked as an ad man, farmer, teacher, filmmaker, environmentalist and campaigner, reinventor of 1970s classic stripped pine and finally, from his mid-fifties, as an author. He was, as his biographer Patrick Barkham said on the programme, of the generation that believed it could do anything and everything, and did.

Hayes and Barkham described Deakin enticingly as ‘puckish’: a Green Man with wild woollen hair and handsome features that appeared to be sculpted from wood. His ‘frog’s-eye view of the world’ offered a portrait of the English landscape from the water it ran into.