"Not my business to go and unearth the original source documents."  If you read widely enough instead of relying on large overview sources and have more than a superficial interest in the subject, sooner or later you might "unearth" the original documents, which are surprisingly easy to come by.  A large portion of the naval history books I have listed in my library came off the internet for nothing, and if you're lucky you'll find books which quote documents verbatim.  Last weekend I had the great pleasure to take advantage of a incompetent error made by the National Archives and was able to download a few dozen service records for free, instead of the hundreds of pounds of the five hundred pounds/thousand dollars plus I would normally have had to pay.  Already I have seen where certain historians (Gordon in The Rules of the Game is one) have obviously not checked the service record and made false assertions about certain officers, and also where they have cited the service record yet written something entirely different.

Marder is interesting because in his twenties he was possibly the last person to look at a great deal of Admiralty literature.  It's bad enough that in many cases he doesn't cite specifically the details of the correspondence involved, but it really didn't help that the Naval Historical Section literally purged untold numbers of documents, a process which was finally halted in the late fifties.  Therefore quite literally a lot of Marder's scholarship depends on his reputation and not the facts.  (talk |  | )