News

This month’s update, introduced by Rohan McWilliam, adds 8 new articles, with a special focus on popular entertainment on the London stage, and in particular the female stars known as the Gaiety Girls, in the decades before the First World War.

This month’s update adds the biographies of eight new subjects of African or part-African descent: Harry Edward, James Harley, Peter McLagan, Sam Minto, De Jornette Plummer, David Smith, Daphne Steele, and Cassie Walmer. 

This month’s update, introduced by Hannah Smith, adds the lives of 22 people connected with equestrianism in modern Britain, including Dorothy Brooke, Marjorie Bullows, Eva Christy, Tony Collings, Ruby Ferguson, Maxwell McTaggart, Harry Faudel-Phillips, and Dorian Williams.  

This month’s update adds the biographies of ten new subjects, ranging from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries: Wulfrun; Engelard de Cigoné; Elizabeth de Vere, countess of Oxford; ‘The famous paynter Steven’; Emanuel van Meteren; Sir Henry Lello; Thomas Baker; Thomas Goodwyn; Edith Stedham; Urania Goodwyn. Read the introduction.

This month’s update adds the lives of eleven women mainly active in science and literature: Sarah Frances Alleyne; Alice Blanche Balfour; Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne; Edith Ellen Humphrey; Nora Lang; Ethel Vaughan-Sawyer; Jane Sinnett; Maria La Touche; Catharine Weed Ward; Josephine Mary Ward; Doreen Wallace.  Read the introduction.

This month’s update comprises ten new articles on women active in public life from the end of the fourteenth to the late twentieth century: Joan Beauchamp (Lady Bergavenny), Joan Cooke, Hortense Mancini (duchess of Mazarin), Jane Baldwin, Sarah Curran, Lucy Cavendish, Marjorie Powell, Madeleine Symons, Dorothy Elliott, Margaret Campbell (duchess of Argyll).  Read the introduction here.

This month’s update, introduced by Carolyn Oulton, adds the lives of eleven women who were successful writers of popular fiction between 1870 and 1920: Florence Barclay, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, Theo Douglas, Mary Gordon, Maxwell Gray, Ella Lindow, Bessie Marchant, Jean Middlemass, Catherine Pirkis, Florence Warden, and Gertrude Warden.  Read the introduction here.

The April 2023 of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) adds new biographies of 247 men and women who died in the year 2019.

This month’s update adds new biographies of 247 men and women who died in the year 2019. Browse a selection of new articles here, and read the summary of new content here.

This month’s update adds nine new articles, many with a focus on lives with a global dimension, including: the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman traveller to Rome, Master Gregory; the Norwich cloth merchant Thomas Baret whose goods found markets throughout Europe; the Scottish surgeon Charles Maitland, who observed the practice of inoculation in the Ottoman Empire; the sculptor Francis Williamson, whose statues of Queen Victoria were unveiled across the British Empire; the international banker Sir Clinton Dawkins; and the artist Christopher Ironside, best-known for his designs for Britain’s decimal coinage, and also for the new coinages of many of the Commonwealth's independent states. Read the introduction here.