Bomb, Book and Compass

Simon Winchester - Bomb, Book & Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China 

The seventeenth-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon famously declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great inventions: gunpowder, printing and the compass. What he didn't know was that the Chinese had been successfully using all three, long before the West ever 'invented' them. And yet it was another 300 years before a remarkable man called Joseph Needham embarked on his lifetime's work which would finally set the record straight. Inspired by a wartime mission to occupied China, he wrote a twenty-four-volume masterpiece, chronicling the nation's astonishing history of invention and technology over five thousand years. In Bomb, Book and Compass, Simon Winchester tells the story of Joseph Needham, his magnificent book, the passion that inspired it, and the remarkable rise of the Chinese nation that continues to this day. 

About Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester, OBE, a British writer, journalist and broadcaster, was born in north London on 28th September 1944.

After taking time off to hitch-hike around Canada and the United States for almost a year between leaving school and entering university, he went up to Oxford in 1963, to read geology at St. Catherine’s College. There he became involved in the University Exploration Club, and was the member of a six-man sledding expedition onto an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice-cap in 1965.

After graduation in 1966 he joined a Canadian mining company, Falconbridge of Africa, and worked as field geologist in Uganda, looking for copper deposits in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains, close to the border with Congo. He then made a sudden and unexpected switch to journalism in 1967, a short while after reading, while in a jungle camp in Uganda, a copy of Coronation Everest by James (now Jan) Morris.

In 1969 he joined The Guardian, first as the Newcastle upon Tyne-based regional correspondent and later as Northern Ireland Correspondent, based in Belfast. He remained in Ireland for the next three years – during which time he was named Britain’s Journalist of the Year, in 1971 – and covered all of the major developments in the territory, from the British government’s introduction of internment without trial of IRA suspects, through the events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in January 1972, to the British army crackdown during Operation Motorman. During this period he became a frequent commentator on and contributor to BBC radio.

In 1972 he was posted to Washington, DC, as America correspondent, and spent much of the following four years covering the Watergate affair, the resignation of President Nixon and the election to the White House of Jimmy Carter. It was also during this period that, on the urging of the noted Faber editor Charles Monteith (who edited the poet Philip Larkin and discovered William Golding’s Lord of the Flies) Winchester wrote his first book, In Holy Terror, an account of his reporting years in Ireland.

He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) ‘for services to journalism and literature’ in the New Year Honours list for 2006. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in October 2009.