In the third of three exclusive films for Times Online, Clive James talks about the figures who have shaped our culture. He starts here with Sigmund Freud, who, he says utterly misread the Nazis: "He seems to have believed that the Nazi irrationality was just one more instance of the destructive impulse like any other, and could be contained in balance with the impulses to order, continuity and creativity. He never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself."

Next, in a wonderful, lyrical profile, he looks at the relationship of respect and appreciation between jazz greats Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong, says James, "was a man whose life was never broken, even by the full force of America’s most tenacious social malignancy, white prejudice".

And then, to finish, Sophie Scholl, a female resistance heroine you may never have heard of, but whose bravery resonates today. Says James: "Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it."

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