WHY SHOULD anyone buy the latest volume in the ever- expanding Dictionary of National Biography? I do not mean that it is bad, as the reviewers will agree.

But it will cost you 65 pounds. And have you got the rest of volumes? You need the basic 22 plus the largely decennial supplements to bring the total to 31. Of course, it will be answered, public and academic libraries will want the new volume. After all, it adds 1, 068 lives of people who escaped the net of the original compilers. Yet in 10 year’ s time a revised version of the whole caboodle, called the New Dictionary of National Biography, will be published. Its editor, Professor Colin Matthew, tells me that he will have room for about 50, 000 lives, some 13, 000 more than in the current DNB. This rather puts the 1, 068 in Missing Persons in the shade.

When Dr. Nicholls wrote to The Spectator in 1989 asking for name of people whom readers had looked up in the DNB and had been disappointed not to find, she says that she received some 100, 000 suggestions. (Well, she had written to other quality newspapers’ too. ) As soon as the committee had whittled the numbers down, the professional problems of an editor began. Contributors didn’ t file copy on time; some who did sent too much: 50, 000 words instead of 500 is a record, according to Dr. Nicholls. There remains the dinner-party game of who’ s in, who’ s out. That is a game that the reviewers have played and will continue to play. Criminals were my initial worry. After all, the original edition of the DNB boasted: Malefactors whose crimes excite a permanent interest have received hardly less attention than benefactors. Mr. John Gross clearly had similar anxieties, for he complains that, while the murderer Christie is in, Crippen is out. One might say in reply that the injustice of the hanging of Evans instead of Christie was a force in the repeal of capital punishment in Britain, as Ludovie Kennedy (the author of Christies entry in Missing Persons) notes. But then Crippen was reputed as the first murderer to be caught by telegraphy (he had tried to escape by ship to America) .

It is surprising to find Max Miller excluded when really not yew memorable names get in. There has been a conscious effort to put in artists and architects from the Middle Ages. About their lives not much is always known.

Of Hugo of Bury St Edmunds, a 12th-century illuminator whose dates of birth and death are not recorded, his biographer comments: “Whether or not Hugo was a wall- painter, the records of his activities as carver and manuscript painter attest to his versatility. ” Then there had to be more women, too (12 per cent, against the original DBN’ s 3) , such as Roy Strong’ s subject, the Tudor painter Levina Teerlinc, of whom he remarks: ” Her most characteristic feature is a head attached to a too small, spindly body. Her technique remained awkward, thin and often cursory. ” Doesn’ t seem to qualify her as a memorable artist? Yet it may be better than the record of the original DNB, which included lives of people who never existed (such as Merlin) and even managed to give thanks to J. W. Clerke as a contributor, though, as a later edition admits in a shamefaced footnote, ” except for the entry in the List of Contributors there is no trace of J. W. Clerke” .