It has been said that although copying from one book is clearly cribbing, copying from two is research, and if one can get somebody else to do the copying then it becomes a project. The bulk of our historical knowledge is derived from exhaustive, concentrated research by countless students and university teachers, whose task, unfortunately, is often suspect to the lay observer, who can see no tangible good or practical purpose in it. It is easy to ridicule the narrow, almost trivial subject matter of their post-graduate studies; few of their products are of lapidary distinction, and no one reads them except (presumably) examiners and (occasionally) other historians or students. 

By tradition each monograph, thesis or article has nearly always been distinguished for what Kingsley Amis has termed its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems’. It is astonishing the academic recognition that can be accorded to a few dim, mysterious glimpses into the obvious, provided they are presented in a tedious, depressingly authoritative manner weighted by an impressive number of learned footnotes. It is not hard to find the writer for whom references assume an exaggerated importance, who is unable to open his mouth without putting his footnote in it, so that ultimately the actual text takes second place to the close, exhibitionist print at the bottom of the page.