The criticisms of who has been included in the 241 new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entrants of this year (Report, 13 January; Editorial, 14 January) reflects the arguably impossible task that confronts Dr Alex May and his small team of colleagues who constitute a research project of the Oxford University history faculty and not a vast army of researchers who work for Oxford University Press, who publish the Dictionary online three times a year, in January, May and September. As Dr May explains, he and his colleagues take “advice from a network of around 400 specialist advisers”. He also explains that under his editorship there have been “new ‘strands’ of subjects who died less recently, in areas including imperial, colonial and Commonwealth lives, the impact of people of black and Asian descent on the UK itself, Jewish lives, geographers, linguists, and scholars of foreign cultures. These entries have both highlighted and extended the global reach of the dictionary, which mirrors the place of Britain in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world.”

This is an epic undertaking by a small group of researchers, and certainly not some sort of glib Google exercise, as Omar Alleyne-Lawler, of Black History Month, is quoted as suggesting. It might be said of the ODNB researchers that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Patience is a virtue in research, and should be for present and future readers of the ODNB. As the famous Guinness advert had it: “Good things come to those who wait.”

Bruce Ross-Smith

Oxford

• When I was a member of the Black and Asian Studies Association in the 1990s we raised our concerns about the lack of black and Asian subjects in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At that time they only had 17 entries. They recognised the lack of diversity in the ODNB, and since that time, along with other “experts”, I have been commissioned to write biographies of black and Asian subjects. I have contributed about 40 including the composer Amanda Ira Aldridge, second world war RAF navigator Ulric Cross, actor Norman Beaton, my adopted aunt Esther Bruce (a seamstress from the working classes), and the entertainer Winifred Atwell. In some cases this is the only source of information available about such figures. Many other black and Asian subjects have been covered by other historians who specialise in this field. However, what Oxford University Press has not been good at is promoting this wonderful resource about black and Asian Britons from history. I have raised this with them. The ODNB is not just for the academic elite, it is for everyone, but there is a need for it to be made accessible to the wider public, including Britain’s black and Asian communities.

Stephen Bourne

London

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