By now I was enjoying myself. What had begun as a holiday pastime was developing into an attempt to try and understand, under the microscope of narrative description, exactly what was the movement of the various individuals involved in the establishment of the Royal Academy, what they thought and felt, how they coalesced, using as far as possible and in so far as I had access to them, original documentary sources, most of which have been published, rather than secondary authorities, and using, as far as I felt able to—while, I hope, respecting the documentary sources—an imaginative reconstruction as to who the people were, the differences in their personalities, and their social attitudes. If I brought to the exercise any particular skills, they were not ones of research, but of a reasonably long experience of, and interest in, the tensions which surround any system of professional organisation and a particular experience of how the Royal Academy operates and feels today. Of course, there is a risk of anachronism, of reading back into the past too much of the experience of today. But I would like to think that my experience gives me a particular form of interpretative and analytic sympathy with the micro-politics of these 18th-century debates.