As the voice of ‘Camberwick Green’ and ‘Trumpton’, the BBC chose him as the presenter and writer for ‘Play Away’, the afternoon spin off of the successful ‘Play School’

She was the great-great granddaughter of Queen Victoria and, following the assassination of her father Earl Mountbatten, she took her seat in the House of Lords

He celebrated 40 years in publishing with a famed lavish party attended by his A-list clients, and became an author himself in 2001

Middlesbrough native tackled unemployment, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and his Catholic beliefs in his songs

A lover of the lavish lifestyle and extravagant celebrity shindigs, the super rich arms dealer was never far from controversy

Ignoring family scepticism, she became an actress and went on to gain Hollywood fame for playing upper-class parts and became a socialite of her time

A spy in Palestine and Cairo during the Second World War, Horne’s oeuvre included books on French history, the Algerian independence struggle, Harold Macmillan and Henry Kissinger

Brilliant but undisciplined, Brzezinski’s tough response to the Iranian hostage crisis contributed to Carter losing the presidency

One of Noriega's biggest mistakes was to order personally the execution and beheading of one of his most outspoken opponents ‘like a rabid dog’

The soulful rocker helped make some of the most influential music of the Seventies 

The motorcycle driver won his first MotoGP race at the age of 21 for team Honda, on his home turf at the US Grand Prix at Laguna Seca, California

Marychurch led the intelligence-gathering agency from 1983 to 1989, an era of considerable turbulence for the espionage community leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall

The former Black Panther was an internationally celebrated truth-teller who refused to remain objective in the face of genocide and war

To his detractors he was a manipulator of the news, before sexual harassment allegations halted his career

The self-described ‘narco-journalist’ was gunned down for his work against Mexico's drug lords

The American actor played Raymond Chandler’s detective and won an Emmy Award as best actor for role in big screen break ‘Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones’

The Finnish driver was one of the biggest stars of Sixties and Seventies rally racing, finishing first place multiple times in the RAC, Monte Carlo and 1,000 Lakes rallies

Kessler was chiefly responsible for the shoot-to-kill policy before the Berlin Wall came down

Alongside actors such as David Niven and Judi Dench, his roles over the decades included The Quatermass Experiment, Catweazle and The Darling Buds of May