Jones Barry. Dictionary of World Biography

8th edition. — Australian National University Press, 2021. — 1001 p.I was careful about the relative balance of entries. Certain categories were automatically included: most popes, all British sovereigns and prime ministers, French and German kings and presidents, American presidents, prime ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. I wanted to avoid either including too many Australian entries, or overreacting and having too few. I had to be selective and tried to balance Australian and Canadian politicians, painters, novelists and poets. Inevitably, Israel and Ireland had, and have, a disproportionate international political and cultural significance, with more representation, say, than New South Wales and Victoria, which between them had the same population. My Dictionary had a higher proportion of female entries than Chambers’s or Webster’s but they accounted for less than 15 per cent. I felt that my explanation of ideologies was a strength and I tried to cover my areas of weakness, such as sport, popular music, ballet, ornithology, gardening and 14th-century Islamic tile making. I included some 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, Mountbatten’s reputation has declined since his death.’ I wrote of Anton Chekhov, ‘His funeral was Chekhovian: the coffin was lost, confused with a general’s and returned to Moscow in an oyster cart.’ In the entry on the actor Donald Wolfit, I quoted Clement Freud: John Gielgud was a tour de force, while Wolfit was forced to tour.’ I drew attention to contemporary recognition, or lack of it. 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.