Late arrivals at the Biography Ball

This week a big beast which just keeps getting bigger.

Laydeez ‘n’ gennelmen, please welcome…

What do Geoffrey de Burgh, Roger of Salisbury and John the Chanter have in common. Buzz! --- "Smartypants, Oxbridge" --- "They were all bishops!"
Smartypants is quite right, they were bishops in the 12th and 13th centuries. But their recent claim to fame is that they have just made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Exactly why it took John the Chanter 816 years to receive this accolade, I have no idea. But that’s the way it is with the ODNB – they’re beavering away as I type, preparing the next batch of additions, corrections and essays on themes running through the dictionary.
Don’t run away with the idea that you normally have to wait several centuries to get into the dictionary. You do have to be dead, but not usually for very long. You have to be noteworthy, but not respectable. 202 biographies have already been added of people who died in 2003, including actress Wendy Hiller, singer and share-tipster Adam Faith, and mass-murderer Idi Amin (I told you they didn’t all have to be respectable).

A year in the life

It cost a fortune for the Oxford University Press to prepare a new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography in 2004, and it costs them a pretty penny to keep it up to date. So they are naturally quite keen to get people reading it. Themed articles may not seem like most jazzy way of getting people’s attention, but they are a great way of pulling together the material from the biographies in a readable way. Let’s look, for instance, at the Summer of Love.
40 years after the first release of Sgt Pepper, ODNB have got together with the American National Biography, woven flowers into each other’s hair, and put together a fascinating slice of 60s life. They’re all there – the Mamas & the Papas, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Nyree Dawn Porter (in the TV smash hit, The Forsyte Saga), and all the stars of the Monterey Festival. Celebrity deaths included Joe Orton and Brian Epstein.
You can listen to podcasts of George Harrison or Jimi Hendrix, or go to an interactive album cover for Sgt Pepper – move the cursor over each figure in the picture to find out who they are (Karl Marx and Mae West pictured together, who’d have thought it…).
After all that free love and substance-abuse, I was tempted to tell you that the ODNB also has an interesting feature on Prime Ministers, but it occurred to me that perhaps you don’t share my fascination. Ah well.

(From the Gateway to Websites, select "Biography". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a Key Link. It is a Westminster Libraries Exclusive Resource, which means that you will have to have a Westminster library card to access most the site, although some of the feature articles are freely-available.)