Bin Laden, Booth and Beckham all join the same club
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Your support makes all the difference.Terrorism, football and the law have secured places for Osama bin Laden, David Beckham and Cherie Booth in the Chambers Biographical Dictionary published today.
They are among more than 500 new entries to the dictionary, which has been one of the definitive judges of achievement and fame since 1897.
The seventh edition, coming an unusually rapid five years after the sixth, sees entertainment and the arts earning the highest proportion of new entries with Hollywood stars including George Clooney, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich all making the list for the first time.
British showbusiness is represented by the addition of the likes of Ewan McGregor, Jane Horrocks, Robert Carlyle and Jim Broadbent.
But the changing world of politics also secures entries for George Bush, the US President, Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary. Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader, may still have to woo the voters but he has won over Chambers.
Una McGovern, who edited the list of 17,500 names, said the experience had been fascinating , if onerous at times. A core team of 10 people was augmented by outside experts to decide who was important today in fields as diverse as cricket (new entries include the commentator Richie Benaud and the Australian captain Steve Waugh) and history (the academics and presenters Simon Schama and David Starkey).
"One of the things you have to bear in mind is who is going to retain importance and significance," Ms McGovern said. Zadie Smith's debut novel, White Teeth, was so well received she earned her place even before her second book is published this month.
But Ms McGovern said entries would be reassessed before each new edition, which will now be at five-yearly intervals. If entrants failed to live up to the dizzying expectations of them, they would be dropped. Deletions this year include the Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck and a 19th-century English clergyman, Henry Alford.
"The book goes back a long way and there will be people in there who may have been thought to be significant then but aren't now," she said. Others required updating. The author Jeffrey Archer has tarnished his reputation with his conviction for perjury since the last edition in 1997.
The entries in the modern editions tended to be straight and informative, Ms McGovern said, in contrast with the more opinionated dictionaries of the past. The dictionary once said of the French writer Emile Zola: "His work in criticism and politics are almost uniformly unfortunate."
So there are no caustic observations on the culinary skills of new entrants Nigella Lawson, Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, or reviews of the musical abilities of George Michael and Kylie Minogue.
The dictionary is published by Chambers Harrap at £35.
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