When the great new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published nearly five years ago — and a truly great achievement it was, despite a few carping critics — the printed version seemed almost a luxury item. Many larger public libraries still have the old DNB, with its decennial supplements published throughout the past century, which I myself acquired years ago, in New York rather improbably. It was missing the volume ‘Glover-Harriott’, but my chum Ivon Asquith at OUP kindly procured that for me, so that the handsome blue volumes now furnish my work room along with the Oxford English Dictionary, the 1911 Britannica and the Gibbs and Doubleday Complete Peerage.

But not many libraries could easily fork out £5,000 for the 50 volumes, not to say even fewer private punters; those who did so may be a little pensive now that the price for the complete set has already dropped to £1,500. Price apart, too few of us are MPs who can make the taxpayer buy us the large and lavish bookcases which would be needed to hold the set, and in any case the whole thing is online, so that any entry can be consulted in a trice and for free if you merely have a local library card.

At the time of publication, I visited Oxford and wrote about the ODNB at some length here, as well as in the Daily Mail and the New York Times (guess which of them illustrated my words with a snapshot of Diana Dors in her undies). What struck me was a poignant magnificence: we were witnessing a kind of publication, on paper and between cloth covers, all of high quality, whose like we might not see again. Reports of the death of the book are much exaggerated, and we shall surely still be picking up and turning the pages of solid objects called novels and biographies for a very long time. And yet even the people at Oxford spoke as though this might be the last such mighty work of reference ever to be published in corporeal form. However that may be, the OUP have nevertheless continued their practice of publishing supplementary volumes, the first of which now appears. If the fact that its 1,254 pages cover people who died within the space of only four years suggests some degree of inflation, that’s a fault on the right side, and this volume contains many fascinating as well as dubious personages. But there are are other difficulties.

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