The great and the good - but not the Guevara

With over 1,000 entries, the Oxford Dictionary of Political Biography offers itself as a navigational A-to-Zog of 20th-century world politics.

Since there are bound to be lacunae in any such undertaking, Dennis Kavanagh (who captained a team of over 40 biographical sketch-writers) sensibly divulges something of the game plan at the outset. In particular, he alerts the dictionary's users to the emphasis on elected politicians rather than political thinkers - except in those unusual instances where the former also passed muster as the latter. The stricture of electoral success also frequently denies a place to sundry activists, unionists, and revolutionaries who challenged, or sometimes helped instal, the incumbents of office upon whom the dictionary concentrates. Consequently we find Castro but no Guevara.

There are, however, some editorial priorities about which Kavanagh is less forthcoming. Decisions on whom to include sometimes appear overly determined by the weight attached to particular states rather than the individual figures themselves. The contributing sketch-writers - almost all academics in British universities - have been allotted specific countries, but not all countries have a designated expert, and international figures who transcend national status or office are apt to be overlooked. (No Kofi Annan, for example.) It is perhaps not surprising that Western Europe, the USSR and America should loom rather large, but why is it that Burma and "Malaya", as it is still termed here, merit coverage while Cambodia, Vietnam and the two Koreas do not?

The entries themselves are efficiently drawn sketches, which rehearse key "facts" concerning an individual's background and career, while also proffering a critical verdict. The authors manage a certain candidness but tend to avoid controversy by reporting harsher judgements second-hand, and by balancing positive and negative character traits and political legacies. (Few could quibble that Stalin presided over "huge strides in industrial development", or that these involved "enormous and needless human and material costs".) Since the century's most significant characters are allotted some two to three pages apiece, as against the standard four or five paragraphs, room has been found for useful historiographical summaries and revisionist verdicts.

That the register rarely shifts from dispassionate, scholarly appraisal may disappoint the anecdotalist, truffle-hunting in the dictionary's pages. Peculiar traits of behaviour and anatomy are occasionally considered noteworthy, however. Anyone vaguely acquainted with Lyndon Baines Johnson's character will not be surprised to read that he "once spoke to journalists while being given an enema". But how many of us were aware, for example, of Quintin Hogg's (rapidly removed) sixth digit on his right hand, or the "serious accident" (unspecified) in Nigeria which left John Major with a permanent limp? These peculiarities, however, are nothing compared to one unfortunate quirk of the dictionary itself: namely a descriptive tic which suggests that many of the great figures of 20th-century politics were immaculately conceived - the more miraculously so as they issued from a single male parent. Thus the profusion of entries which begin: "son of...", or much more rarely "daughter of...", a "bankrupt store manager" (Ronald Reagan), "overstrict provincial customs official" (Adolf Hitler), "fisherman killed at sea" (Jean-Marie Le Pen), or "alcoholic peasant" (Nicolae Ceausescu). As a signification of social class, this formulation is ungainly, not to say ungracious to the mothers of the great and the good, and is perhaps a telling reflection on the dictionary's own parentage - some 40 contributing "fathers" to only six "mothers".

Such quirks and quibbles aside, the dictionary nevertheless offers judicious biographical summaries to those concerned with 20th-century world affairs. Unlike many works of reference, it is also priced realistically enough for undergraduate students of history and politics for whom price-per-page matters, and to whom the dictionary may prove most valuable.

Susan Carruthers is lecturer in international politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.