This time, the runaway is the book, not the author, although old habits die slowly.
In common with the others, it received respectful reviews but had a limited readership. For almost 30 years, he has been a globe-trotting journalist, reporting for several English newspapers while also writing a dozen books inspired by his travels.
#Oxford english dictionary book quotes movie#
It is already a best seller in England and has been sold to Mel Gibson's company for a movie to be directed by Luc Besson. ''The Professor and the Madman,'' recently published by HarperCollins, is a kind of philological detective story. Winchester's estimation, a literary masterpiece. How, he wonders, did Shakespeare know what an elephant was? The Oxford English Dictionary (known as the O.E.D.), which eventually took 70 years to complete, was to transform the lexicographic landscape and to become, in Mr. Therefore, the playwright ''could not look things up'' but still knew the meaning of esoteric words. Parenthetically, he ponders such matters as the fact that in Shakespeare's time there were no English dictionaries. Winchester enriches his story with a selection of intricate definitions and also offers a brief and cogent history of dictionaries. The two are twinned in appearance as well as in their dedication to codifying the English language. Minor's photograph appears on the jacket of the book with his long beard and gentle eyes, he somewhat resembles portraits of Claude Monet. Winchester artfully parallels the story of the two extraordinary men, the eccentric professor and a murderer with the sharp intellect. Even after Murray realized Minor's true situation, he still regarded him as his most reliable source, a madman whose words were very much to be trusted. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington. He remained there under guard for the next 37 years, until he was transferred to St.
Minor, an American and a veteran of the Civil War, had killed a man in London and been sentenced to Broadmoor. The strange story of the interwoven lives of Murray and Minor is the subject of Simon Winchester's new book, ''The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.'' In 1872, in a moment of insanity, Dr. Murray, who had not yet met Minor, assumed that he was a ''practicing medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure.'' To his astonishment, he turned out to be a patient in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Minor, a surgeon residing in Crowthorne in the English countryside in Berkshire. The most prolific and faithful correspondent, represented by more than 10,000 entries, was Dr. James Murray began the challenging assignment of editing the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, a project of unprecedented historical and cultural importance, the call went out for volunteers to supply quotations to illustrate definitions.