Simon Winchester (September 28, 1944 - November 3, 2026) was British-American author, journalist, publisher, historian, geologist and polymath, - an expert in a wide of seemingly unrelated subjects. After a career as reporter (he covered the Falkland War, Watergate and the troubles in Northern Ireland) he turned to books. In 1998 he published “The Professor and the Madman,” about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was about the relationship between James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, and a contributor, William C. Minor, who had been jailed at an institution for the criminally insane. It ws a best-seller and in 2019 was made into a movie starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn. We talked abouthis book Skulls on Alan Dudley’s skull collection, and the Sandisfield Times, a small-town Massachuetts he founded, edited and reported for. I highly recommend his book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World — A History of Technology and Precision. It demonstrates how he could write about a niche subject and make its uiversally interesting.
