»The Professor and the Madman

After reading the first few disappointing pages of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like it in The World, I returned to the lucid and elegant prose of Simon Winchester and The Professor and the Madman, which I first read when it was published in late '98 or early '99. Taken with the excellent The Meaning of Everything, this forms the poignant half of Winchester's narrative of the human efforts in the production of the Oxford English Dictionary.