A Century of Witness: A Memoir and a Map of the Life, Work, and Legacy of Sir David Frederick Attenborough

At a hundred, David Attenborough has been seen by more people, in more languages, than anyone else who has tried to explain the natural world, and he has left behind a filmed record of the living planet with no real equal. Most tributes pick out the highlights; this one maps the whole of it. This article follows his life through five working phases, from the young collector to the old man giving evidence on the planet’s decline, and sets down in plain tables the films, the books, the honours, and the fifty-odd species that now carry his name. It ends with an argument for this journal’s readers: that the information professions have catalogued and opened almost every other body of important knowledge but not yet his, and that doing so, and putting it into the hands of the young, may be the most useful tribute we could now pay.