Oxford Dictionary of National Biography In Association with the British Academy

The founding editor of the Oxford DNB, the late Professor H. C. G. Matthew FBA, was fellow of St Hugh's College and Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. His major biography Gladstone, 1809-1898 was the culmination of work on the 'Grand Old Man' of Victorian politics for which he was awarded the 1995 Wolfson prize for history; he also completed the landmark fourteen-volume edition of The Gladstone Diaries (1968-1994). After his initial research on The liberal Imperialists: the Ideas and Politics of a post-Gladstonian Elite (1973) he wrote widely on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, in articles and contributions to collective works such as the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain and the Short Oxford History of the British Isles. Colin Matthew died in 1999.

Brian Harrison, Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography since 2000, has been at the University of Oxford since 1958, when he arrived as an undergraduate to read modern history. He has been Professor of Modern British History since 1996. Since his first book, Drink and the Victorians (1971), he has published extensively on the social, political and cultural history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include Separate Spheres. The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain (1978), Peaceable Kingdom. Stability and Change in Modern Britain (1982), Prudent Revolutionaries. Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (1987) and The Transformation of British Politics 1860-1995 (1996). He edited and contributed to the eighth volume in the History of the University of Oxford (1994) and is writing the final volume (1951-90) in the 'New Oxford History of England'.