Intrepid writer and journalist who reported on the Troubles and Watergate, and whose string of bestsellers began with The Surgeon of Crowthorne
The author and journalist Simon Winchester, who has died after a heart attack aged 82, thought himself lucky to have enjoyed “a pretty interesting, world-wandering life”. Those wanderings yielded a harvest of 30 books across a vast spectrum of subjects: from the land beneath to the wind above; from earthquakes to dictionaries, oceans to engines.
The globe-trotting polymath, an American citizen from 2011, loved to take an everyday “invisible thing” in culture or nature – such as the winds of his final book, The Breath of the Gods (2025) – and show how it shapes private and public histories. We first knew about the Chornobyl disaster, which hastened the end of the USSR and a new geopolitical order, because an aberrant wind allowed Swedish scientists to measure the radioactive fallout freakishly blowing from Ukraine.