The dictionary’s scope is ‘from the earliest times to the year 2000’, and two credentials form the basic entry visa. ‘National’ here means British in the widest possible sense: that is, having to do with England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the rest of the little archipelago (Norman Davies calls it simply ‘the isles’), and/or having to do with ‘Britain in the world’. Mostly this means lives led or originating in, or destined for, British colonies, embracing everything from the colonial Americas to late twentieth-century Hong Kong. This unapologetically imperial sense of ‘national’ clearly also embraces people from elsewhere who have had an extraordinary impact, or left an indelible mark, on the ‘global Britain’ thus defined, e.g., Joseph Conrad, Anna Pavlova, Henry James, Truganini. And the ODNB does its best not to exclude lives that reflect any other plausible sphere of British influence (back and forth): Cromer’s Egypt, for example, or modern Canada, South Africa, and Australasia. The second credential is mortality. The ODNB is a club of the strictly dead. But nobody, not even people who turn out not to have existed at all, has been excised from the core of the old DNB, which has been revised but not culled, a welcome gesture of historiographical continuity. The current principles of selection exhibit a boldly Victorian taste for vastness, breadth, and volume. Everybody from Pytheas (the fourth-century B.C. Greek explorer who left the earliest written account of the British Isles) to Leigh Bowery (though Meg Russell’s article about him is far too long) has been admitted, if not welcomed with open arms.

With the ODNB, conventional reviewing methods are impossible. One can only take soundings. I have spent several months imagining the picture of Australia and her peoples that a reader in Delhi or Halifax or Milton Keynes or Aberdeen or New Haven, Connecticut, might piece together from the host of relevant lives in the ODNB. Is the coverage fair and accurate? Yes, as far as I can see. Have they got the balance right – First Fleet, exploration, gold rush, Federation, the world wars, the Depression? I think so. Anybody missing? Inevitably, but let’s look at who is there. The great and the good are well covered: explorers and navigators, soldiers and sailors, colonial bishops, governors and politicians, men of capital, pioneer women, artists and writers, scientists, and engineers. Most governors-general and all Australian prime ministers up to Robert Menzies (the majority with good photographs) are represented, except for James Scullin and Earle Page (hardly a surprising omission). In Scullin’s case, however, nine useful references crop up after a keyword search, one in each of the articles on Frank Anstey, Ben Chifley, John Curtin, H.V. Evatt, John Latham, Joe Lyons, Douglas Mawson, Menzies and Keith Murdoch. Page, meanwhile, has a walk-on part in the articles about Stanley Bruce, Billy Hughes, Lyons and Latham as before, and that of his boss at Yarralumla, the earl of Gowrie. The search engine picks up numerous references to other missing persons, though prudent cross-checking confirms that the John G. Gorton who wrote A Solution of that Great Scriptural Difficulty the Genealogy of Jesus was not the same likeable Liberal senator for Victoria who became prime minister in 1968. Nor was our Harold Holt the sturdy brass founder of Bury and father-in-law to Bishop Stopford of London.

Somewhat surprisingly, Heather Radi’s article about Prime Minister Bruce struck me as fascinating. He was obviously the handsomest and best-dressed prime minister thus far – and is unlikely to be supplanted any time soon. Bruce said of all his achievements he was most pleased with his Cambridge blue, his captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, and his Fellowship of the Royal Society (1944). One wonders how he found time to put pressure on Atatürk or to run the country. Lord Bruce, the High Commissioner in London, had been a wealthy businessman, but when in 1968 he died at 7 Prince’s Gate in London he left a mere £35,479. What happened?

Aboriginal Australians are patchily represented, and the tally of dedicated articles seems to be (in chronological order): ‘Pemulwoy (c. 1760–1802), Aboriginal warrior’, by Richard Broome; ‘Bennelong (c. 1765–1813), Aboriginal visitor to England’, by Alan Atkinson (the designation is crazy; one might as well describe Anna Pavlova as a ‘Russian visitor to England’ and not a ballerina – but the article itself is good); ‘Truganini (c. 1812–1876), Australian Aborigine’, and ‘William Barak (1823?–1903), Australian Aboriginal leader’, both by A.G.L. Shaw; ‘Albert Namatjira (1902–1959), Aboriginal artist’, by Sylvia Kleinert; and ‘David Unaipon (1872–1967), writer and promoter of Aboriginal rights’, a miniature masterpiece by Philip Jones that doubles as a melancholy portrait of South Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.

A search for ‘any life event in or at Melbourne’ in the fields of literature, journalism or publishing between 1900 and 2000 yields an impressive crop of articles on Martin Boyd, Rolf Boldrewood, Ada Cambridge, Annie Maria Dawbin, Gavan Duffy, Madge Garland, George Johnston, Alan Moorehead, Keith Murdoch, Henry Handel Richardson, David Syme, and Angela Thirkell, among numerous others. There are ninety-three articles on Australian women, including the convict and author Margaret Catchpole; the ‘immigration administrator’ Caroline Chisholm (naturally); the philanthropist and evangelical Lady Victoria Buxton; the mining speculator, proprietor of the Sunday Times and pug breeder Alice Cornwell (known as ‘Madame Midas’, about whom Fiona Gruber is now writing a fully fledged biography); the actress Coral Browne; Dame Mabel Brookes (I am not sure I would describe such a formidable person as a ‘socialite’: the term seems wrongly calibrated for Melbourne in the 1950s, but, on the other hand, what on earth was she?); the Tasmanian Aboriginal Truganini (Shaw’s account is slightly constipated); the novelist Mrs Campbell Praed; Peggy Ramsay; Mabel Atkinson; and Dame Nellie Melba. This gives a good impression of the spread. Curiously, in a book that aims to get the fine detail exactly right, no mention is made by T.G. Rosenthal of the remarkable fact that Sidney Nolan, R.A., was the only Australian (never mind Australian artist) ever to be made both a Companion of Honour and a member of the Order of Merit, a really intriguing mark of his high standing in Britain. Unlike Stanley Bruce, Nolan died rich. When probate was granted in 1993, his estate was worth £2,324,118.

Should we be troubled by the fact that in the ODNB the lives of Australian Aborigines and prime ministers (along with their New Zealand, Barbadian and Malaysian counterparts) are interleaved with British racing identities, hangmen, misers, nuns, pamphleteers, and minor peeresses? Of course not: if the reader in Delhi or Halifax or Milton Keynes or Aberdeen or New Haven cares to trace their footsteps, she will find that they, too, criss-cross an empire that has gone for good. The ODNB is surely its most magnificent tombstone.