An extensive biography about former Labour Prime Minister Dom Mintoff has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which was published today, the Oxford University Press said.
It is one of 222 biographies of people who died in 2012 and who in their own way had an influence on Britain. Following the January 2016 update, the Oxford DNB now has 54,716 articles in which are told the life stories of 59,879 people. 11,412 biographies include a portrait image of the subject.
The Dom Mintoff biography, which was written by Prof. Henry Frendo, deals with the rise to power of the Cospicua-born politician, his fight for integration with Britain which “came to nought” and was followed by Malta’s attainment of independence, and Mintoff’s engineering of a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives for Malta to become a republic.
It goes on to portray how Malta “got rid” of the British military base in 1979, and how Mintoff’s star started to decline as “agents of intimidation and terror” were allowed to do as they please. Mintoff stayed on as Prime Minister in spite of the Labour Party obtaining fewer votes than the Nationalist Party in the 1981 election and in the subsequent years “democracy (was) tottering on the brink”. It goes on to speak about his later years in politics, which ended with causing the Labour Party “to lose office” for a second time in 1998, and his death in 2012.
In his conclusion, Prof. Frendo describes Mintoff as “Idiosyncratic and vitriolic, he was a mover and shaker who left a larger-than-life mark on history.”
Prominent figures in the new edition include: the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012); war correspondentMarie Colvin (1956-2012); editor of the Times, William Rees-Mogg (1928-2012); the astronomers Sir Patrick Moore (1923-2012) and Sir Bernard Lovell (1913-2012); hairdresser Vidal Sassoon (1928-2012); Jim Marshall (1923-2012), inventor of the Marshall amp; Allan Horsfall (1927-2012), pioneer of gay rights in Britain; and Gerry Anderson (1929-2012), animator and creator of the children’s puppet series, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds.
The full biography of Dom Mintoff can be seen here