The world of critical scholarship

Back in 1952, AHN Green-Armytage wrote this splendid description of the world of critical scholarship:

“There is a world – I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit – which is not the world in which I live. . . . In my world, if I read that Mr. Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud the foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. . . . In that world (it would appear) men and women come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they ‘preserve traces of primitive tradition’ about things which happened well within their own adult life.”