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What’s New: November 2024

This month’s update adds thirteen new articles on people active over four centuries including: Anthony Knipe, an English merchant in Sweden in the 1630s; the royal administrator Peter Hume now identified as a founder of English literary critique; three surgeon anatomists in eighteenth-century London; the writer on colour theory Mary Gartside; the Sussex schoolmistress and poet, and friend of Shelley, Elizabeth Hitchener; Charles Lenox Richardson, a London merchant in pre-Meiji Japan; and Alice Abigail Corkran, editor of the Girl’s Realm; together with a biographical survey of the founders of the Savile Club.

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Balfour, Gerald William, second earl of Balfour (1853–1945), politician and psychical researcher

The politician Gerald Balfour, who was secretary for Ireland from 1895 to 1900, devoted his long retirement from politics to psychical research. Correspondence from his female circle sheds light both on his own preoccupations and those of elite women at the turn of the twentieth century.

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News

NOVEMBER 14, 2024

What's New: November 2024

Welcome to the 116th update of the Oxford DNB, which has a special focus on lives with a global dimension, literary lives, and medical lives. This update adds twelve new biographies, spanning four centuries, and one reference group article, and also includes four revisited biographies. There are also three additional portrait likenesses.

OCTOBER 24, 2024

What’s New: October 2024

Welcome to the 115th update of the Oxford DNB, which adds biographies of four people of African or part-African descent in Britain and its empire, accompanied by a reference group article and seven new portrait likenesses. 

SEPTEMBER 19, 2024

20th Anniversary of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

To celebrate the ODNB turning 20, we’re sharing thirty influential lives from the British Isles spanning nearly two millennia.

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