You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

I am known as a dangerous and designing woman, immoral and unclean, she wrote in January

1918, nobody likes me.

At almost six feet tall, with blazing copper-colored hair and turquoise eyes and a great beaky face,

her appearance was legendarily idiosyncratic. She spoke

in a weird nasal cooing sing-song drawl. Her amazing looks were at once sexy and grotesque.

She wore fantastically highly coloured clothes and hats with great style and bravado, but she was

easily caricatured because of her looks.

Whatever people thought of her, everybody agreed

that Lady Otterline Murrell lived life

to the full and brimming over,

and that it was an extraordinary life.

A Bloomsbury hostess, a mistress, a dominant figure in the arts without being an artist herself.

...