The writer and journalist Simon Winchester will be coming to St
Catherine�s College on Wednesday 15 October 2008 to talk about his
latest book
Bomb, Book & Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China
5pm in the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre
All Welcome
A note about Simon Winchester:
Having reported from almost everywhere during an award-winning twenty-year
career as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, Simon Winchester, who
is an alumnus of St Catherine�s, is currently the Asia-Pacific
editor for Condé Nast Traveler and contributes to a number of American
magazines, as well as to
The Daily Telegraph,
The Spectator and the BBC.
His books include
Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire;
Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles;
The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare
(a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over);
Prison Diary, Argentina (the story of three months spent in a Patagonian
jail on spying charges during the Falklands war);
The River at the Centre of the World - A Journey Up the Yangtze;
Back in Chinese Time; The Surgeon of Crowthorne;
The Fracture Zone and The Map That Changed the World.
Trailer from Penguin for
Bomb, Book and Compass:
Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at
Cambridge
University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to
supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei-Djen, and in that moment
began the two greatest love affairs of his life � Miss Lu, and
China.
Miss Lu inspired
Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years
as a wartime diplomat. He established himself as the pre-eminent
China scholar of all time, firm in his belief that
China would one day achieve world prominence. By the end of his life,
Needham had become a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and
honoured by all � though banned from
America because of his politics. And in 1989, after a fifty-two year
affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion.
|