The Footnote, by Anthony Grafton (Faber & Faber, £7.99 in UK)

If a historian has the imagination to propose a history of the bits at the bottoms of the page, you'd be entitled to suppose he'd have the imagination - and the information - to do the job properly. And so it is with this marvellously illuminating little book, which, having turned literary and historical scholarship upside down to examine its underwear, proceeds to tell all - the deviousness of academic writers, the tricks by which they manipulate and undermine each other's theses and the role footnotes have played, as a result, in the development of Western academic thought. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, is witty without being flippant, informative without being pedantic, and hugely, consistently entertaining.