The Surgeon of Crowthorne - A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary

Penguin, 1999. Reasonable second-hand condition.

Dr James Murray, erudite and pious, who broke free from an impoverished childhood to become a towering figure of British scholarship and editor of the great Oxford English Dictionary. Dr. W. C. Minor, lascivious, charismatic, a millionaire American Civil War surgeon and homicidal lunatic. Confined to Broadmoor asylum he pursued his passion for words and became one of the OED's most valued contributors. These two lives and their unlikely friendship are unravelled in Winchester's classic work of detection....