Great piece! I loved this paragraph:
Blockquote Prescriptions of this kind reached their apotheosis in the little essay on ‘The Art of Note-Taking’ which Beatrice Webb included in My Apprenticeship (1926). It propounded the famous doctrine of ‘only one fact on one piece of paper’. In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating , the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: ‘I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?
Glad to know I’m not alone in the struggle of making atomic notes!
