By Dr Stephen Wilks

The Dictionary of World Biography by Barry Jones, public intellectual, former politician, and eternal polymath, is a very dangerous book indeed – but in the benign sense that once opened it is so engrossing as to be hard to put down. It also is one of the world’s great works of reference. Its latest iteration was recently published by ANU Press in the Biography Series, an initiative of the National Centre of Biography.

This tenth ANU Press edition – not the last, Barry tells us – was celebrated on 29 May at an event hosted in Melbourne by the Redmond Barry Society. The venue was the Ian Potter Queen’s Hall, the glorious historic core of the State Library of Victoria a.k.a. ‘the people’s university’, as CEO Paul Duldig describes it. Maxine McKew introduced a conversation between Barry and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that ranged across the case for such a book, contemporary political culture, and the future of the printed word, no less. 

The DWB has a complex publication history dating back to 1952 (yes!), detailed in Barry’s autobiography A Thinking Reed (2006). In 2011 Garry Sturgess encouraged the NCB to exhume and revise what Barry calls fondly ‘my obsession’. Professors Melanie Nolan and Tom Griffiths proposed that it appear both as an ebook and in traditional printed form, while from 2013 Christine Fernon worked as Barry’s editor and encourager, ‘with patience (well, mostly), good humour and erudition.’

This book is worth reading for its elegant introduction alone. Barry writes that ‘the shock of recognition’, also the title of another of his books (2016), ‘examines the impact of self-discovery after exposure to, or immersion in, the uncanny, the challenging, the transcendental, relating the specific to the universal, the immediate to the timeless, the individual to all humanity’. 

The latest edition runs to nearly 1,000 pages encompassing about 9,100 entries, all written by Barry himself. It is far more than a ‘born, lived, died’ collection of lifelessly worded life summaries. Barry’s self-declared magnum opus is, he says, ‘highly personal and opinionated, even semi-autobiographical.’  This includes reflecting his ability to ‘see patterns and interactions long before others’, amounting to ‘a framework of relationships between the living and the dead’ akin to ‘a sculptor’s armature’.

Barry concedes his being ‘far more familiar with the culture of Europe, and its North American and Australian extensions, than of other continents’, but has tried hard to identify figures from across the globe for inclusion. The DWB also gave him ‘opportunities for reappraisal of women, so often grossly under represented’, hence the presence of Hatshepsut, Hildegard of Bingen, Olympe de Gouges, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Nadezhda von Meck, Louise Bourgeois, Vera Rubin, and Margaret Fuller.

Innumerable anecdotes enliven and encapsulate. One of the author’s favourites concerns Anton Chekhov: ‘His funeral was Chekhovian: the coffin was taken to Moscow by train in a refrigerated car intended for oysters, and the funeral procession was confused with a general’s, accompanied by a military band.’  Amongst the liberal smattering of Australian figures, we learn of the great social reformer Caroline Chisholm that ‘Dickens satirised her, unfairly, as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House’. The entry on James Joyce concludes tellingly with a list of other great writers denied the Nobel Prize for Literature that includes Ibsen, Tolstoy, Zola, Hardy, Conrad, Wells, Orwell, Levi, Gorki, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Malraux, and Auden. Naturally, all are subjects in the DWB.

Barry has a marked ability to draw minimalist but telling word pictures of subjects. Of Harold Macmillan he writes: ‘with Attlee he was the only British Prime Minister in three centuries wounded in action; he had the unhappiest prime ministerial marriage since Lord Melbourne; and was the best-read Prime Minister since Gladstone.’ Much personal detail is little known. Abraham Lincoln ‘had a high pitched, penetrating voice, awkward hands and movements’, was ‘the first bearded president’, and ‘may have suffered from Marfan’s syndrome, a hereditary heart and bone disease’. Bold, big calls on wider history include that ‘the great overall postwar rise in prosperity in the developed countries and the absence of catastrophic unemployment is largely due to Keynes.’

The DWB is indeed, as Malcolm Turnbull put it, a work ’that encourages you to browse’. Vast, cerebral, and all-encompassing, it is the recommended desert island book for anyone interested in biography, history, and humanity itself. 

Available free online, and for purchase in hardcover, via ANU Press.