The new, three-and-a-half shelf-metre, 62.5 million-word Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) brings to mind what Dante Gabriel Rossetti (q.v.) once wrote about Top, his pet wombat (d. 1870): it is ‘a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness’.

In sixty volumes, the ODNB covers 54,922 lives in 50,113 biographical articles ranging in length from brief notes of a few dozen words to 37,400 (the longest, on Shakespeare). It is the work of approximately 10,000 contributors and advisers (302 of them Australian), and an Oxford team of 362 associate editors. The huge task of correcting and augmenting mineral water tycoon George Smith, Leslie Stephen, and Sidney Lee’s original DNB (1885–1900); revising and incorporating the twentieth-century supplements, and collating the lists of errata, which for a century have been patiently and optimistically accumulated at the Institute for Historical Research – to say nothing of the task of writing 16,315 new lives, and replacing nearly as many old ones – all of this was achieved in just twelve years, and on schedule. The online version, which will incorporate corrections, is equipped with a powerful search engine, which, for better or worse, stands in for an index volume. (A sixty-first volume, listing all the contributors and their subjects, may be purchased separately.) By any measure, it is an amazing, colossal achievement. The literary style is occasionally brilliant, but more often necessarily spare, dry and at times hilarious – ‘Merlin [Myrddin] (supp. fl. 6^th cent.), poet and seer, is a figure whose historicity is not proven’ (you can say that again). But the point is that this huge collection of lives is for exploration, browsing and reading, not only for archaeological excavation, data retrieval, or bio-bibliographical first aid. As maybe the last giant book in English, the ODNB is a work of panoramic beauty. Time for a second mortgage.