I hope such developments mirror those in academic journals, in which the footnote number in the text takes you not only to the footnote itself but also to the content of the work cited.
Towards the end of the book comes the inevitable pitch: The authors recommend a "Conscious Business Audit," for which a footnote explains they have "developed our own proprietary methodology".
Even the manner in which the footnotes surround the text suggests, unmistakably, a desire to contain it on the page.
His experiments with various dialects cannot be conveyed in English, he explained, and his allusions to Arab mythology and history require a degree of familiarity for which the footnotes are a weak substitute.
The 1942 Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Quirin, which is footnoted in the white paper, says that "by universal agreement and practice, the law of war draws a distinction… between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants.
One of Hersh's sources for that assertion was Lavelle himself, as Hersh detailed in this passage in an engrossing, six-hundred-word footnote in "The Price of Power," his book on Kissinger (the full footnote, which is well worth reading, is after the jump*): [T]he reasons for Lavelle's abrupt disappearance were kept secret.
The form of the book is intimidating: a biographical dictionary, with long scholarly entries on obscure figures in the history of culture, interrupted by long scholarly footnotes, which are in turn interrupted by further footnotes.
Then there is Israel's submission, Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," which won the best screenplay prize at Cannes.
Formally he relied upon the footnote, which became his trademark - and which, with an unapologetic bravura, he managed to make sexy.
There is, however, one footnote which may divert attention from whatever he achieves today: the whereabouts of his controversial trainer Michele Ferrari, who is on trial on drugs charges.
