The Dictionary of National Biography, 1981-1985... With an Index covering the years 1901-1985

by C . S . Nicholls (Editor), RobertBlake (Editor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1990

  $3.25

  This volume includes biographies of 380 distinguished men and women who died between 1 January 1981 and 31 December 1985. For the most part the entrants are British, though a few subsequently took other nationality (e.g. the soldier and author John Masters), and some, though spending much of their life in Britain, never became British subjects (e.g. Anna Freud). The lives of some eminent Commonwealth citizens, such as Indira Gandhi, are also recorded. This is the first DNB 20th century supplement to span only five years, and is thus more topical and less unwieldy than the decennial volumes. The shorter time span has made it possible to commission the most appropriate contributors more readily, and to draw on accurate information about a person's career from colleagues and contemporaries more easily. As in other volumes, the entrants form a distinguished roll-call of persons prominent in many fields. Politics and the law are represented among others by politicians George Brown and R.A. Butler, union leader Terence Duffy, and Baron Diplock, the judge who established trial by judge alone in Northern Ireland. The exploits of spies Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean are recorded, as are those of the Russian defector Igor Gouzenko, balancing the more conventional military service of field-marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck and the legless flying ace Douglas Bader. People from the stage include actors Richard Burton, Diana Dors, Sir Ralph Richardson, and Dame Flora Robson; ballet dancer Sir Anton Dolin and ballet director Dame Marie Rambert, both of whom worked for Diaghilev; and comedians and entertainers Arthur Askey and Eric Morecambe. From the world of letters comes writer Robert Graves, novelist A.J. Cronin, poets Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, historian Michael Wallace-Hadrill, and journalist James Cameron. Musicians are dominated by the distinguished triumvirate of composers Sir William Walton and Herbert Howells, and conductor Sir Adrian Boult, all of whom died within a fortnight of each other early in 1983. The careers are also recorded of Dame Bridget D'Oyly Carte, proprietor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and singers Matt Monro and Billy Fury. Science is represented by Nobel prize-winners Paul Dirac, the theoretical physicist, and Sir Martin Ryle, the radio astronomer; sport by Michael Hailwood, world champion motor-cycle rider, and the cricketer Percy Fender. The entries are usually written by people who knew their subjects personally, and who thus can flesh the bare bones of biographical fact with private knowledge and personal anecdote of interest to historian and general reader alike.