At this stage, my writing was no more than a holiday recreation, trying to understand for my own purposes why the Royal Academy had come into being in the way that it did, why it is structured in the way that it is, who was responsible for its system of organisation. I am the first to acknowledge that institutional history is not everyone’s cup of tea; that it’s extremely hard to make the life of ancient committee meetings interesting; and plenty of people have said, either politely or slightly less politely, that people are interested in reading about artists as artists, not as members of an organisation, even an organisation as historically significant as the Royal Academy. But, of course, you cannot wholly disaggregate the practice of art from the circumstances in which it is practised. The establishment of the Royal Academy gave the next generation of artists a place where they could be trained. It gave the artists who were involved in establishing it a sense of their artistic, as well as their social, prestige. We are nearly all in one way or other involved in organisations and in the social networks which surround them. The way they operate, and their culture, bears historical analysis. After all, there’s a huge literature on the management of modern organisations. I see no reason why some of the same analysis should not be applied to organisations and their culture in the past.