Simon Winchester

The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time is a book by Simon Winchester. It details his travels up the Yangtze river in China and was first published in 1996. Viewing an ancient Chinese painting scroll drawn by Wang Hui gives the author the inspiration on how to structure …

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most …

The Meaning of Everything is a 2003 book by Simon Winchester. It concerns the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary under the editorship of James Murray and others, one aspect of which Winchester had previously written about in The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

The Map that Changed the World is a book by Simon Winchester about English geologist William Smith and his great achievement, the first geological map of England and Wales. Smith's was the first national-scale geological map, and by far the most accurate of its time. His pivotal insights were that each local sequence …