There's a good chance that you will have read one of Black's books without really noticing it, as there are 33,239 books of his in library holdings around Britain, more than any other single historian. Yet where is his CBE or Companionship of Honour? Where are the birthday dinners hosted by the Royal Historical Society and the History Association? Where is his inclusion in Festschriften, in-depth newspaper profiles about him, his TV series on Channel 4, or any of the other myriad marks of public esteem that are lavished upon lesser historians, including the monster on the page opposite? So far Black has received only an MBE, and that was 10 years ago, for services to stamp design.

The key to this lack of recognition is his massive output. Fellow academics simply cannot believe that 85 books he has written since The British and the Grand Tour was published in 1985, can be any good. They have come out on an average of one every four months ever since. Yet they are good. If one has a body of knowledge and primary research built up over a lifetime of study, as Black does, it is possible to write many more books than most academics truly want to. Black shows other academics up - ergo, he can't be any good. Except in the Salisbury Review and the Spectator, he is hardly ever reviewed.

Yet here is a man who won an entrance scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge. He took a starred first there three years later and then won the Harmsworth Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford. He took his PhD, and became a professor before the age of 40. He is generally pro-American, anti-Marxist and a believer in using chronology to tell an historical story. Because of this he has been largely written off by the fashionable, modernist wing of the history profession. There is also doubtless, consciously or subconsciously, a sense of envy that his books do something most academic historians' do not: they sell.