I have always loved to write, that is, to pay attention to the fact that I am doing something more than amassing scholarly information. And I have always despised the monkish obscurity cultivated by certain academics. The first sentence of my doctoral dissertation was “Sir Henry Yelverton was no friend to Sir Walter Ralegh.” I liked it precisely because you could not tell if you were beginning a novel or a history or—as it happened—a Ph.D. thesis.