January 2015 sees the addition of 226 biographies to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, offering the lives of those who have played their part in shaping British history between the late 20th and early 21st century. The sectors and professions each of these individuals influenced range from medicine to film, including Nobel Prize and Oscar winners. Explore our infographic below as we highlight a selection of these new lives: some well-renowned, some lesser-known, yet all significant.
You can download both jpg and pdf versions of the infographic. To discover more about these lives, visit the Oxford DNB’s January update page.
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The New Year brings with it a new instalment of Oxford DNB biographies which, as every January, extend the Dictionary’s coverage of people who shaped British life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This January we add biographies of 226 men and women who died during 2011. These new biographies were commissioned by my predecessor as editor, Lawrence Goldman, but having recently assumed the editor’s chair, I take full and appreciative responsibility for introducing them.
The new biographies bear vivid witness to an astonishing diversity of personal experience, individual achievement, and occasional delinquency; and they range from Claude Choules (b.1901), the last British-born veteran of the First World War, who died at the age of 110, to the singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse (b.1983), who died from alcohol poisoning aged just twenty-seven. The great majority of the people whose biographies are now added (191, or 84%) were born before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the majority (137, or 60%) were born before 1930. Typically, therefore, most were active between the 1940s and the 1980s, but some (such as Choules) are included for their activities before 1918, and several (such as Winehouse, or the anti-war campaigner, Brian Haw) only came to prominence in the 2000s.
The lives of Choules and Winehouse—the one exceptionally long, the other cut tragically short—draw attention to two of the most significant groups to be found in this new selection. A generation after Choules, many Britons served bravely during the Second World War, among them the SOE veteran Nancy Wake who led a group of resistance fighters and who killed German soldiers with her bare hands; SOE’s French section sent 39 women agents into France during the war, and Wake was undoubtedly among the toughest and most redoubtable. Her fellow SOE officer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, is best known for his capture, on Crete, of the German officer General Kreipe—an event that was retold in the film Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). In March 1942 Leslie Audus was captured by the Japanese and put to work in a slave labour camp. There he employed his skills as a botanist to create a nutritional supplement from fermented soya beans, saving him and hundreds of his fellow prisoners from starvation. After the war, Audus enjoyed a distinguished scientific career though, with great modesty, he made little of his remarkable prison work, which remained known only to former captives who owed him their lives.
The troubled creative life of our latest-born person, Amy Winehouse, is representative of a second significant group of lives to emerge from our new set of biographies. These were the entertainers for whom the celebrity-devouring world of show business was a place of some highs but ultimately of disenchantment and disappointment. Forty years before Winehouse came to public attention, the singer Kathy Kirby enjoyed a glittering career. Ubiquitous in the early 1960s with hit after hit, she was reputedly the highest-paid female singer of her generation. However, she failed to adapt to the rise of rock’n’roll, and soon spiralled into drug and alcohol abuse, bankruptcy, and psychiatric problems. The difficulties Kathy Kirby experienced bear similarities to those of the Paisley-born songwriter Gerry Rafferty, best known for his hit single ‘Baker Street’, which deals with loneliness in a big city; Rafferty too found fame hard to cope with, and eventually succumbed to alcoholism.
Of course, not all encounters with modern British popular culture were so troubled. One of the longest biographies added in this new update is that of the actress Elizabeth Taylor who shot to stardom in National Velvet (1944) and remained ever after a figure of international standing. While Taylor’s private life garnered almost as much attention as her screen roles, she’s also notable in pioneering the now popular association between celebrity and charitable causes—in Taylor’s case for charities working to combat HIV/AIDS. To that of Elizabeth Taylor we can also add other well-known names, among them Lucian Freud—by common consent the greatest British artist of his day, whose depictions of human flesh are unrivalled in their impact and immediacy; the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who made his career in the US; Ken Russell, the enfant terrible of British cinema; and the dramatist Shelagh Delany, best-known for her play, A Taste of Honey (1958).
In addition to documenting the lives, and legacies, of well-known individuals—such as Freud, Hitchens, and Delaney—it’s also the purpose of each January update of the ODNB to include people of real historical significance who did not make the headlines. In creating a rounded picture of those who’ve shaped modern Britain, we’re helped enormously by more than 400 external specialists. Divided into specialist panels—from archaeology and broadcasting to the voluntary sector and zoology—our advisers recommend people for inclusion from long lists of possible candidates. And it’s their insight that ensures we provide biographies of many less familiar figures responsible for some truly remarkable achievements. Here is just one example. Leslie Collier was a virologist who, in the 1960s, developed a heat-stable vaccine for smallpox which made possible a mass vaccination programme in Africa and South America. The result was the complete eradication of smallpox as proclaimed by the World Health Organization in 1980. How many figures can claim to have abolished what was once a terrifying global disease?
Whether long or short, good or bad, exemplary or tragic, or something more nuanced and complex in-between, the 226 new biographies now added to the Oxford DNB make fascinating—and sometimes sobering—reading.
Featured image credit: Amy Winehouse, singing, by NRK P3. CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
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Judith Newman talks about three books that explore the real-life inspirations for the hit TV series "Downton Abbey."
I was shocked, as I expect many who read this blog will have been, by the death of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm not a devoted fan, I will confess that now, so anyone who was planning to write their own obit. can feel free, but nevertheless, I mourn her loss. She was one of those writers that one simply thought would always be there, somewhere, a necessary presence, there to remind us of what fantasy should be like, can be like if you know enough, think enough, write hard enough, a reminder to fantasy writers of what they should be trying to attain. She was a writer of endless inventiveness, originality and imagination, an inspiration, acknowledged or not, to later generations of writers. She knew fantasy inside out and the mythos on which it is largely based, because of that, she knew how hard it is to be original. For me, originality is the hallmark of really great fantasy and Diana Wynne Jones had it in spades.
Taking a leaf from the
Bookwitch's blog and adopting a bit of serendipity, going off at a bit of a tangent, I'll admit to another shock this week, with the death of Elizabeth Taylor.
Again, I've never been a great fan of hers, but like Diana, I just always thought that she would
be there, somewhere, being impossibly beautiful and sultry, a last reminder of a lost world of Hollywood glamour when stars were stars. I read Camille Paglia's article in yesterday's Sunday Times, mourning the loss of 'Hollywood's last great goddess of erotic power' and found myself wondering with her at the contrast between Elizabeth Taylor, the '
pre-feminist woman', and the 'skeletal,
pilates-honed, anorexic silhouettes' of modern female stars, like Gwyneth
Paltrow,
Keira Knightley and most others that you could name. As though, somehow, Hollywood has rejected the depiction of real women in favour of androids.
I don't suppose that Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Wynne Jones will appear together anywhere else, but isn't that what ABBA is for? Nostalgia is probably just another word for getting old, but for me the world will be much the poorer for the loss of these two very different women.
It's been a decade or so since Elizabeth Taylor of the
Chicago Tribune invited me to review Robb Forman Dew's novel,
The Evidence Against Her. I didn't know Robb at the time, but I quickly grew enamored of her gifts, her craftsmanship. I didn't, in fact, expect that I ever
would know Robb, nor imagined that she'd find the words I'd ultimately write about her novel. I was wrong, of course. Robb found my words. She wrote me a letter. And soon Robb and I were friends.
In the intervening years, Robb sent books, she sent a tapestry she'd found in an old barn, she sent notes, she sent encouragement, she sent praise of a novel on which I worked. She sent us—her large coterie of writerly friends—something we might do in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the name and address of a school to which we all might send boxes of brand new, hand-picked books. Robb proved to be one enormously generous soul, and then things got quiet as she settled into work again, and I waited for what would come next, and next.
I just now finished reading Robb's masterful new novel—its title as clever as the rest of it.
Being Polite to Hitler carries forward, from
The Evidence Against Her, a certain Agnes Scofield and her close-knit, famous-in-Washburn, Ohio kin. It takes us to October of 1953 on through to the early 1960s on the wings of some of the most gracious writing you'll ever find and some of the most seamless historicism I've ever seen in a novel. No doubt Robb did her homework for this story—sourcing the telling details of Yankees games and Sputnik, home perm kits and development housing, polio and fashion. But more importantly, none of it feels heavy or dug in. It's just life as Agnes Scofield knows it, and what's most important, always, is Agnes and her kin.
I could conceivably quote from every line in this book; I've dogearred the whole, darned, gorgeously packaged volume. Let me quote, selfishly, from something that struck me as quintessentially Robb—her ability to unpolish a good woman just a bit, so that we can see ourselves (or perhaps our someday selves) within her. From somewhat late in the book:
People liked or loved you or they didn't, according to their own needs. Not a single night of the months in Maine had she lain awake agonizing over the possibility that she might accidentally have slighted someone, or that she might have exhibited favoritism to some member of the family as opposed to another. She knew perfectly well that she was capable of—and had indulged in—a certain spitefulness now and then, and generally she had apologized. If she happened to slight someone by accident or through ignorance, or just through a failure to rein in her tendency toward bossiness... Well, she no longer tormented herself about it. Her newly hardened indifference was unexpected; it was a state of being that she hadn't known existed.
After finishing
Being Polite to Hitler, I went back and read my review of
The Evidence Against Her. That review begins like this—words that strike me as still utterly relevant and true. Read Robb Forman Dew.
Perhaps the only thing more bewildering than gauging one’s own mind is imagining the minds of others—the
With the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, I rarely read outside the realm of biography and history until I was in my late twenties. I wanted to know as much as I could back then; I thought all education was based on the facts. And so I read about the history of science and the history of technology. I read the life of Tolstoy and not his stories.
When Elizabeth Taylor recently asked me to review Jane S. Smith's new Luther Burbank biography, The Garden of Invention, for the Chicago Tribune, I was taken back to a former self—taken back quite willingly. I loved this story about this seed and plant man, this grafter, hybridizer, cross-fertilizer. I turned off the phones and read it all on a single, stolen Monday.
A few paragraphs from the review are here:
He was a genius, by the estimation of many, "an evoluter of new plants," by his own. He changed the shape of potatoes and married an apricot and plum. He gave rise to the Shasta daisy and the Royal walnut, gave tours of his Santa Rosa, Calif., gardens to no less than Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller and Jack London, and because he was one of the very busiest men on Earth -- others said so, he concurred -- he began, in 1907, to charge a fee to those ordinary citizens who hoped to stand, for a moment, in his considerable shadow....
All in all, this Burbank makes for a tremendous character, and with "The Garden of Invention," Smith, who teaches at Northwestern University and previously authored "Patenting the Sun," has yielded a first-class portrait -- witty, seamless and unflaggingly informed. I couldn't find a single useless tangent to critique, didn't stumble across the arcane, didn't wish for light, for there was always light in this book that brings Burbank to pulsing life even as it teaches plant science, patent law, eugenics, evolution and the fate of the prickly pear.
It's all here in "The Garden of Invention" -- not too much and never slight -- and I was, from its first sentence to last, a most grateful reader. I was wishing, as I turned the book's final pages, that I could go enroll in a Jane S. Smith class, sit back and learn whatever she is now teaching.
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Beth Kephart ,
on 4/8/2009
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While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.
"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.
It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.
Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.
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So true, Celia. I'm also not a dyed-in-the-wool DWJ fan, as I'm not that big on fantasy, but such a sad loss. Both sad losses.
I am not keen on a lot of fantasy but I did enjoy DWJ - her description of Sophie's aches and pains is entirely real too!
Lovely post Celia.
Great post, great women. I heard - did you? - that Elizabeth Taylor left instructions for her coffin to arrive 15 minutes late at the church. She said she wanted to be late for her own funeral.
That is style.
Thanks Celia....I agree with what you say. I never met Diana W-J but did meet Liz Taylor (that famous production of Dr. Faustus in Oxford in the Sixties!) and can report that Richard Burton used to call her DUMPY as a nickname. She was extremely beautiful, but had reassuringly SHORT legs. Hence, I guess, the name....
I'll admit I've never read any of Diana's books. However having just looked at her vast book list I'm going to add her to my reading list. It is sad to think fans will never be able to experience the thrill of reading a new book by her but at least they can still enjoy the legacy she has left.
Thank you, Adele, for sharing that - good to know she wasn't perfect! I'm going to go back to DWJ's books also. What better tribute can you give a writer than to read or re-read her work?