Dictionary of World Biography

For more than 60 years I have worked in short bursts on my magnum opus, the dictionary of World Biography (DWB).
It demonstrates my preoccupation, even obsession, about making sense of the world to myself and sharing those insights with others. The work, inevitably, is highly personal, even semi-autobiographical, projecting my involvement in politics, teaching history, extensive travel, and absorption in music, literature, the arts, religion, philosophy, ethics, and decades of work with a disaster relief organisation and campaigns to reduce blindness.
As a student in 1950, I was profoundly influenced by the great 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'.
I set out the convolvulated history of the Dictionary of World Biography in my autobiography A Thinking Reed (Allen and Unwin, 2006). A variant of the text appeared as the Introduction in six editions of the DWB published by ANU Press 2014-19. ‘True Biographies of Nations?' (edited by Karen Fox, ANU Press, 2019), a collection of papers presented at a seminar in Canberra in July 2016 about dictionaries of biography generally, includes my own contribution, ‘Writing a Dictionary of World Biography'. This Introduction draws from all three sources.
[Acton: 2021]

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