Keith Thomas has performed his life’s work with scissors and ink, staples, index books, old envelopes, cardboard boxes and a forest of slips of paper: “some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion.” He admits, “The sad truth is that much of what it has taken me a lifetime to build up by painful accumulation can now be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.”

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 730