Stephen Weir

Stephen Weir is a British writer, editor, and publisher, educated at Cambridge University, who has worked on three continents across a career in publishing.

His professional background is unusual for a popular history author in that much of it was spent on the other side of the desk. He has worked with authors including the Australian novelist Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the military historian John Keegan, and the financier George Soros, which is a range that suggests a general editorial career and not a specialist one.

His best-known book appeared in 2005 as Encyclopedia Idiotica and was reissued as History's Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them, with later illustrated editions from Metro Books and IMM Lifestyle. It collects fifty historical disasters, running from Adam and Eve through Hannibal, Nero, Erik the Red, Moctezuma, Lord North and the Boston Tea Party, the Maginot Line, Gallipoli, thalidomide, Robert Maxwell, and Enron.

The organising device is its most distinctive feature. Instead of proceeding chronologically, Weir sorts the failures by the motive behind them, drawing on a fixed list including pride, greed, anger, sloth, and false hope, which places a sixteenth-century emperor beside a twentieth-century corporation and invites the reader to notice the resemblance.

The book has been criticised by readers familiar with individual periods for factual errors and for including famous disasters that were not decisions, and it was written for a general trade audience and not as scholarship. It sold well on the strength of its title and its premise.

He has published other titles in a similar popular reference vein and continues to work in publishing.