Lies, damned lies, and scholarship

It means being blockaded in one's study in the early hours of the morning, encircled by empty coffee cups, terrorised by publishers' impossible deadlines. By the left hand, a set of increasingly dog-eared proofs, the pages now, by definition, out of order; by the right, a home-made card index, imperfectly alphabeticised, its contents cascading out of the shoebox. In the midst, the edgy author desperately trying to distil the essence of years of research and hundreds of pages of text into the compass of an index which in ten or twenty pages must provide a finding-guide that meets every reader's needs to a T.