pages and your own doctoral work will entail a similar amount
of heroic commitment on your part, a wholesale and necessary
reconstruction. You must not, ever, construe a gap between the
apparent straightforwardness of this text and the messiness or
difficulty of your own authoring experience as reflecting
adversely upon your authorial competences. Reading so far has
been the easy bit. Doing authoring remains, for all of us, every
time, a considerable trial.
In case this seems too sickeningly modest a view on which
to end, let me mention that the object of Oakeshott’s conde-
scension about crib books was actually Niccolò Machiavelli’s
The Prince, a book so original, widely read and influential that
it gave English (and many another language) a new complex
word (‘machiavellian’). In my own view a new ‘crib’ book is as
valid as any other book, helping us to consolidate an estab-
lished body of knowledge, to systematize it and then immedi-
ately to begin to change and reimprove it. How else, in our
text-based civilization, can we make progress? The really impor-
tant thing for any book is how readers approach it and what
they seek to do in using it. As A. D. Sertillanges once wrote:
‘A book is a signal, a stimulant, a helper, an initiator – it is not
a substitute and it is not a chain.’^4
AFTERWORD◆ 265