Margaret Thatcher joins Ronnie Biggs and Mick McManus in the nation's biography

But death is a great leveller. And so Margaret Thatcher finds herself today among the new entrants in the 2017 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the standard work of reference on 60,000 figures who shaped British history, from the Roman occupation onwards.

The 60-volume tome, which now runs to 72 million words, has only two criteria for inclusion: its subjects must be noteworthy and no longer alive.

This helps to account for the eclectic selection of new additions this year. In addition to the Iron Lady, the great train robber and the vocalist remembered in equal measure for Wild Thing and a celebrated, under-the-counter tape of recording studio profanities, there is space for the broadcasters David Frost, David Coleman and Alan Whicker, and the wrestler Mick McManus.

The appraisal of the former prime minister, commissioned from the historian Sir David Cannadine, is one of the book’s longest entries and charts her rise from grocer’s shop daughter to the doorstep of Number 10, in 1979.

Cannadine is somewhat dismissive of the cult of Thatcher­ism, describing it as “a political phenomenon rather than a coherent philosophy”.

But he concludes: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”

Both Alan Whicker and David Frost looked to Yorkshire for a good deal of their screen exposure - Whicker as one of the influential figures behind the launch of Yorkshire TV, and Frost as the star of David Frost’s Global Village and Through The Keyhole, both made at the station.

Other Yorkshire figures added to the new edition include the actors Peter O’Toole, born in Ireland but raised in Leeds, and Richard Griffiths, who hailed from Thornaby-on-Tees in the old North Riding.

Sir Robert Edwards, the Batley-born physiologist who, with the surgeon Patrick Steptoe, pioneered IVF conception, a method now used by tens of thousands of families, is also in the 2017 edition. Sir Robert died four years ago, at 87.

A further Yorkshire entrant is Vera Houghton, the women’s health campaigner who helped steer the Abortion Act through parliament in 1967. She was the wife of the Sowerby MP Douglas Houghton, and died three years ago, 11 months short of her 100th birthday.

While the former Grandstand presenter David Coleman finds himself in the august sporting company of the rugby player and broadcaster Cliff Morgan and the cricket writer and commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Ronnie Biggs receives a more cursory appraisal. He was, say the publishers, “only a bit-part player” in the train robbery itself, “but as a fugitive from British justice turned his notoriety into money-making celebrity”.

The mastermind of the heist, it adds, was Bruce Reynolds, who died within 10 months of Biggs in 2013, and is also included in this year’s edition.

Other notable names to make the cut are the singer Tony Sheridan, who, although just a footnote in the history of popular music, was the first person to perform on disc with The Beatles, when he and they were appearing at different clubs on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn in the early Sixties.

The book also finds space for their Liverpool neighbour, the gag writer Eddie Braben, who scripted most of Morecambe and Wise’s shows during their most successful period in the Seventies, and for both members of another double-act, Mike and Bernie Winters, who were popular on ITV in the 1960s. Bernie Winters, who had a later solo career, died in 1991, his brother Mike three years ago.

Mel Smith, the comedian who in bulk at least, made up two-thirds of another double-act with Griff Rhys Jones, is a further inclusion.