The serious business of editing

Heh. From the UK Spectator, November 1, 2014 in the Diary section by Andrew Roberts.

The editing of this book has been an extraordinary intellectual exercise, due to the omnivorous brain of my editor at Penguin, Stuart Proffitt. Among the scores of questions he asked me in the first sets of edits were: 'How wide was the river Po in 1796?', 'Did Napoleon take Herodotus to Egypt?' and 'Was Napoleon conversant with the astronomical theories of Herschel?' Still, that was better than in my last book , where he asked of one gag of which I was particularly proud, 'Are you sure this joke is funny?'