CRUDEN'S COMPLETE CONCORDANCE to the Old and New Testaments may no longer be the best-known book in our benighted age, but to anyone wanting to identify or even employ (it does happen) a biblical quotation, it is essential. It has never been out of print for 250 years. It is as important a tool to any researcher as the OED, which in its prodigious completeness it closely resembles.

Six years ago Simon Winchester discovered that the story of the writing of the OED was as extraordinary as the work itself, and by telling it he produced his first bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Publishers nowadays constantly look for ways of repeating past successes, and with Alexander the Corrector