How on earth does he know that, they are forced to ask themselves, and why did I never tumble to that. It takes a while to discover that the knowledge, though impressive and useful, has its limitations, and when the glow of imaginative creation no longer suffuses it, it is not really deeply grounded. What he tells us he tells through his films, just as Ingestree suggested that Robert-Houdin revealed himself through his tricks. Also he is not inhibited by education, which is the great modern destroyer of truth and originality. They're all so highly educated, you know.
Education is a great shield against experience.
It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others. As an historian I had all my life been aware of the extraordinary importance of documents. They summed up something that was becoming increasingly important to me, and that was an earthly form of immortality. Historians come and go, but the document remains, and it had the importance of a thing that cannot be changed or gainsaid.