I hate footnotes. “Having to read footnotes,” Noel Coward once said, “resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”V I understand that if you’re gradgrindingVI your way up the greased pole of academia, footnotes are the necessary, soul-draining, dead weights of drudgery that threaten to drag you down to the Slough of Adjunctdom whence you came.