Mr Wallis cuts through calcified myths with forensic scholarship (the endnotes are 80 pages long), recovering for posterity a saga that might otherwise have been lost.The founder of the 101 was Colonel G.W. Miller, a confederate soldier from Kentucky who parlayed ambition, risk-taking and courage into a cattle empire.
Those who grumble about delays and overcrowding on trains into London (like this reviewer) should count their blessings.One quibble is that too few references for the many statistics in "Rush Hour" are easily found in the otherwise meticulous endnotes.
Endnotes are used almost at random.The book ends with some provocative claims.
There is much to draw out a smile but little of the outright hilarity found in "Watt".Faber's "Echo's Bones", an elegant, 138-page hardback edited by Mark Nixon with endnotes six pages longer than the story is an exemplary piece of scholarship, and would make a good gift for a Beckett aficionado or collector.
Leaning back on archives and propped by endnotes, he convincingly shows that as prime minister again in 1951 Churchill strained every muscle to pull the Soviet Union into a dialogue.
He wrote by hand, because this forced his brain to wait, and he strove for a style that preserved an "oralish, out-loud feel" (a detail Mr Max tucks away in the endnotes, which read like entertaining out-takes from a fine film).Wallace was preoccupied with the manipulative desire-mill of a media-saturated society.
Neither's endnotes and bibliographies indicate that they have even glanced at almost any of the most important modern works on British imperial history.
Endnotes are also increasingly popular and the publisher Indigo uses the edges of the leaves as a canvas (especially niftily done on Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher, which features a flock of birds in flight picked out by UV varnish).
Still, Morris's obsessive reader-friendliness often has the opposite of the intended effect — it stops you, or, at least, sends you back to the endnotes, because you wonder how he can possibly know exactly what long-dead characters were saying, and even thinking, during a particular dramatized moment.
But publishers aren't taking endnotes off the Web.
This is the first of many citations of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, a source that Kennedy cites in his endnotes but makes little use of in his text.
