The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

The making of the Oxford English Dictionary becomes a fascinating story in the telling of Simon Winchester. That one of the editor’s chief correspondents and contributors to the dictionary was an image in an insane asylum, is just one of the many surprises. And, did you know that were it not for Henry Liddell of Greek Lexicon fame and of Oxford, the great dictionary would have been called the Cambridge English Dictionary. (And, that at Liddell’s funeral the thing most remembered about him was not his advocacy for the Oxford English Dictionary or his Greek Lexicon, but that he invited a poor mathematics tutor, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, on a Sunday picnic at which Liddell’s daughter Alice saw a white rabbit run by, dive down a hole, and asked the mathematics tutor to tell her a story — he added that the white rabbit had a watch it its waistcoat pocket…).