 On 5 March 2009 Oxford University Press publishes the first print
supplement to the 60 volume Oxford DNB (2004). The new volume
includes entries on 819 men and women who shaped modern Britain
and who died between 2001 and 2004.
Each January since 2005 the Oxford DNB’s online edition has added approximately 200 new biographies of noteworthy figures who died in a single year after 2000. It is these life-stories, accompanied by 277 portraits, which are now published in a single volume—moving forward the boundary of the original 60 volumes into the twenty-first century.
Many of those featured in this new volume are remembered, as in the examples of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke or the politician Roy Jenkins, for careers spanning many decades.
 Some—including the musician George Harrison or the
campaigner Mary Whitehouse—are more closely
associated with specific periods in post-war British history.
Others enter the national record for what have since become landmark moments, be they Kenneth Wolstenholme’s World Cup commentary, Brian Trubshaw’s Concorde test flight, or the controversy surrounding the death of the weapons inspector, David Kelly.
 Alongside these figures are less familiar names
responsible for some well-known features of modern British life—from Godfrey Hounsfield and George Hersee, inventors of the CT scanner and the test card, to Jack Worsley, bringer of acupuncture, and Barry Bucknell, pioneer of television DIY.
 And because this is the Oxford DNB, many of the lives
also offer a range of entertaining insights. So here you’ll
meet the lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, whose Rolls Royce
sported the number plate 'L1BEL' and Ian Russell, the
entrepreneurial duke of Bedford, who wrote in the visitors’
book of a rival: ‘You should come to Woburn. It is better.’
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