Introduction

‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.’

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1881), Part II, Book 5, Chapter 4: words spoken by Ivan Karamazov.

My Dictionary of World Biography, under a variety of titles, has been an obsession for more than 70 years.

Inevitably, my magnum opus is highly personal and opinionated, even semi-autobiographical. I am hidden (barely) within its pages.

I often feel like Odysseus on a long voyage of discovery, making a connection between me—here—now and everyone—everywhere—all time, balancing the sublime with the quotidian, recognising the tension between the unique and the universal. It helps me make sense of my own experience and reinforces a sense of connectedness (‘we are not alone’) with the unfamiliar and remote.

In October 1952, as a disenchanted Law student, I wrote to Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, proposing a Penguin Biographical Dictionary, received a cautiously encouraging reply in November and began writing entries.

It was the beginning of a very long process.

By May 1959, at the age of 26, as a history teacher at Dandenong High School, I completed my first draft. I retain three bound volumes of text: 837 foolscap pages with about 430,000 words and 6,000 entries.

In January 1961 in London I signed a contract with Penguin Books. Then followed 16 frustrating years, due to internal divisions and changes in personnel and policy, until Penguin paid me off, quite handsomely, in 1977. Macmillan Publishing, London, somewhat unexpectedly, took up the work and it appeared, with some curious omissions, as The Macmillan Dictionary of Biography, in October 1981. Two editions, of which I knew nothing, were also published by Routledge and St Martin’s Press in New York. Then in 1986 Brian Stonier of Macmillan Australia became the publisher and much improved versions appeared until 1989.

Michael Wilkinson, of Information Australia, later Wilkinson Publishing, published a much expanded and revised Dictionary of World Biography from 1994 until 1998.

After 1998 there was another long hiatus, when multi-volume or single-volume reference books such as Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Columbia Encyclopedia were going out of print because of free access to millions of entries on Wikipedia, and the low cost of e-publishing.

In 2011, Garry Sturgess helped to persuade the National Centre of Biography, which publishes the Australian Dictionary of Biography, at The Australian National University (ANU) to exhume, update and revise my obsession.

At ANU, Melanie Nolan and Tom Griffiths were enthusiasts and encouragers and proposed that the DWB appear both as an ebook and in traditional printed form. Gareth Evans, ANU Chancellor at the time, was a benign influence.

In 2013 ANU E Press produced the work, revised and largely rewritten, in paperback and online. Michael Wilkinson published a handsome hardcover version in 2016 in conjunction with ANU Press.

In The Republic, Plato describes a darkened cave, with a long entrance leading to daylight and the natural world. The cave’s inhabitants are there for life, kept in by bars, but also conditioned through habit. Shadow plays seen on the walls constitute reality to them and they lack curiosity to explore the world outside.

The cave metaphor seemed eerily prophetic in the era, first, of film, then television, then computing, computer games, smartphones and social media.

Getting people out of Plato’s cave involves encouraging them to confront ‘the shock of recognition’ in unfamiliar, challenging phenomena, grasping the range of human diversity, trying to reconcile depth of understanding and breadth of experience, distinguishing between the macro and the micro.

‘The shock of recognition’, which I used as a book title (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.

I tried to pursue the concept of ‘the abundant life’, rattling the bars of the cave, escaping from a conceptual shoe box, by investing time and concentration, connecting with transcendental creativity, pursuing intellectual and aesthetic engagement—aiming to experience excitement, satisfaction, happiness, and often a sense of awe or the edge of danger. This involves taking risks. High culture, with all its complexity, can take us to places where we do not expect to go and has some aura of danger.

Tackling complexity is not just a matter of taste but an essential evolutionary developmental mechanism, which strengthens brain plasticity and capacity, wards off loss of cognition and the onset of dementia more effectively than computer games, Sudoku, crossword puzzles or jigsaws.

This suggests an analogy with cathedrals, and their two axes, vertical and horizontal.

The vertical pulls our gaze upward, looking through the vault towards the stars, reaching out for the transcendental and numinous, rapture and the unattainable—for some, Heaven. Pursuing the vertical is difficult, complex, dangerous, involving travelling alone, coming to terms with the mysterious, the aspirational, the abstract, the unique.

The horizontal is comfortable, familiar, reassuring, earthbound, physical, less challenging and safer, with no fear of falling.

In a secular, technological, materialist and self-absorbed society, there may be risk in even mentioning the cathedral analogy, since so many have been deeply alienated, even traumatised, by childhood experience of religion.

When I become preoccupied with a subject, the urge to share experience becomes irresistible, even if my audience shows palpable reluctance.

I could be accused, as an aged white male, of being unduly Europhile in my tastes. Proffering long, complex entries for Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler and virtually ignoring practitioners of folk music or country and western may be seen, in a deconstructionist age, as condescending, hierarchical—even patriarchal.

I concede, at once, to being far more familiar with the culture of Europe, and its North American and Australian extensions, than of other continents—but I have travelled extensively, and eagerly seek out the work of Asian, African and South American artists looking for achievement comparable, say, to that of Bach, Michelangelo or Shakespeare, just as I seek their equivalents in recent centuries, anywhere.

It was painful to observe that so many had no access to the unfamiliar and transcendental. If they knew nothing of Homer, Mozart, Darwin and Einstein they were missing something potentially life-changing. If the names of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao drew a blank, then fellow humans, especially the young, would fail to grasp the context in which their world evolved. And the DWB gave opportunities for reappraisal of women, so often grossly under-represented in reference works: Hatshepsut, Hildegard of Bingen, Æmilia Lanyer, Olympe de Gouges, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Tubman, Florence Nightingale, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Marie Jaëll, Nadezhda von Meck, Marie Curie, Louise Bourgeois, Simone Weil, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Julia Gillard, Helen Garner, Sarah Gilbert, Vera Rubin, Gertrude Elion, Eleanor Marx, Margaret Fuller, and Simone Young.

The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne, a contemporary of Shakespeare and one of my heroes, had an extraordinary gift for making linkages—extracting from his own observations a sense of the universal, but also the infinite and inexplicable, examining the unpredictable ways his mind worked, then projecting his thoughts into speculation about the universe. And he was scrupulously undogmatic.

I don’t hold myself out as a profoundly creative or original thinker, but I am good at linkages, the only person, so far, elected as a Fellow of four of Australia’s five learned Academies. ‘Only connect! Live in fragments no longer’, as E. M. Forster wrote.

I often see patterns and interactions long before others. In my head, from childhood, I constructed a framework of relationships between the living and the dead. This was like a sculptor’s armature, a metal structure to which clay or wax is applied to produce a shape for casting as an artefact. Later, I built up similar frameworks about history, politics, geography, literature or music.

It was said of me, correctly, that I never met a piece of paper that I didn’t like, and I collected books and documents from an early age.

Reading about the political history of Australia, Britain, the United States, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Japan, Brazil and Türkiye made me conscious of the changing relationships between the living and the dead, as time’s arrow flies past the procession. This approach encouraged my abiding fascination with people and their connections to institutions and events. The results can be seen in my notorious quiz successes and my writings and speeches.

The uncomfortable truth is that my mind usually works as a giant memory bank. Getting access to material and disseminating it in a precise and comprehensive form is important and I can be unsettled by misquotations or confused dates or false attributions.

In 1950, as a student, I had been profoundly influenced by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and observed him in Melbourne at close quarters. He said: ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’

If I am remembered at all, I would like it to be for my role in abolishing the death penalty and for being a prophet without much honour in promoting linkages between science and politics.

I was the first Australian politician, long before I became Minister for Science, to argue that climate change was an existential threat to civilisation, and to campaign about the genetic revolution, the information revolution, post-industrialism and a post-carbon economy.

The 2024 edition runs to nearly 1,000 pages in small print, about 9,100 entries and 950,000 words.

Four factors determined entry length: likelihood that the entries would be frequently consulted, availability of resource material, degree of influence that the subjects had on how we live (language, inventions, medicine, war, nutrition, religion, philosophy, exploration, education, communications, transport, economics, entertainment, the arts, architecture), and the extent of cross-referencing to other subjects in the DWB, indicated by *.

How tactful does an encyclopedist have to be in writing about living subjects? Publishing serious entries on the living may inhibit discussion of sensitive issues such as sexuality, mental and physical health, addictions and obsessions, or financial links, and much primary source material will be inaccessible or embargoed. Postponing treatment of subjects still living, and presumably not eager to be eligible, gives future biographers space and time to reflect instead of rushing to judgement. I had no such inhibition with my DWB and emphasised linkages between past and current subjects.

I included tightly compressed anecdotes and the occasional telling quotation, such as Artur *Schnabel’s comment on *Mozart’s piano sonatas: ‘Too easy for amateurs: too hard for professionals.’ I reported strongly critical views: ‘Handsome, imaginative, but superficial and distrusted by his contemporaries (*Alanbrooke, *Montgomery, *Templer, *Ismay), *Mountbatten’s reputation has declined since his death.’ I wrote of 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.’ Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo *Lang ‘developed an embarrassing passion for the actress Anne Todd’. In the entry on James *Joyce, I pointed to the long list of great writers who had failed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: Ibsen, Tolstoy, Strindberg, James, Hardy, Conrad, Gorki, Proust, Rilke, Musil, Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Borges, Malraux, Greene and Auden (all with *).

Despite my long, and increasingly unhappy, career in politics, I tried to be clinically detached in my entries on public figures, and would immodestly point to entries on Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon. However, I have not disguised my loathing of totalitarian systems, whether Left or Right, and entries on Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao are obvious examples. I felt that my explanation of ideologies was a strength and over many years I tried to cover my areas of weakness, such as sport, popular music, ballet, ornithology, gardening and 14th-century Islamic tiles.

I tried to be careful not to overload the DWB with Australians. If I included a contemporary Australian politician or writer, should there also be a Canadian of equal standing? My intention had been to keep some balance but I may have underdone it.

The numbers of entries on Jews, Irish, Scots, and Hungarians, despite their relatively small population reflect their exceptional contributions to music, literature, philosophy, mathematics, physics, medicine or engineering. Inevitably, Israel and Ireland (with a combined population of 15 million in 2024) have had a disproportionate political and cultural significance globally, with more representation in the DWB, say, than subjects from New South Wales and Victoria (also 15 million combined).

If a serious attempt was made at a global biographical dictionary, with international participation, the first problem would be choosing authors to write on controversial figures such as Luther, Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, Khomenei, and Pius XII. Would editors necessarily choose a Korean scholar to write about Kim, a Chinese for Mao, a Catholic for a Pope or a Lutheran for Luther?

Who should write the entry on Jesus? A Jew, a Christian, a Palestinian, an agnostic, a Catholic, an Orthodox, an Anglican, a Protestant, a fundamentalist, a liberal, a sceptic, a historian, a philosopher, a theologian? I could suggest possible authors, but the choice will not be mine and age alone would rule me out.

Since 2013 Christine Fernon, from the National Centre of Biography at ANU, has been my co-worker on this project; she has been exemplary as an editor and encourager, noting slips and occasional sloppy writing and suggesting improvements—all delivered with patience (well, mostly), good humour and erudition.