Fiction writers usually thank friends, relatives and publishers in small type at the end of their books, inviting readers to move straight into the story. This is sensible, because one wants to get to the meat of a novel as fast as possible and the preliminary pages seem like a waste of paper. When expressions of gratitude do feature within the first few pages, there is at least a considerate minimalism about them: a simple listing of people who have helped the author is the convention. More and more, however, the preliminary pages of fiction are filled instead with hype-tripe which, like saturation advertising, seeks to awe readers into buying a book. We are now at a point where we look sceptically at a book which is not prefaced with huge blasts of hot air about the author, who is always 'fluent in several languages' (we are not expected to ask if this has hindered the one in which his book is written) and who always 'divides his time' between New York, London, and a few other towns which are only a little less exalted than New York and London (we are expected to marvel at how he manages to write books in between). This practice is almost always reversed in books of non-fiction, where the preface and acknowledgements pages are by tradition at the beginning and represent an expansive terrain over which the author has freedom to strut and name-drop on his own behalf. 'Earlier versions of the chapters that comprise this book', we could hypothetically be told (and quite unselfconsciously), 'were delivered as keynote addresses at Harvard University and Princeton University, as conference papers at Cambridge University and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and on a barge for special invitees on the lake near the Bellagio Conference Centre in Italy', this being followed by a full-scale parade of the names of well-known intellectuals who have nourished the author during the course of his research. This throat-clearing lets the writer point out that the rest of us are not in the same league as he is, he's already been to all the important places and talked to all the great people we only wish we had. Looking as an editor at academic prefaces and acknowledgements, where such thinly disguised self-congratulation is sometimes nakedly on display, is a difficult business. Though it is certainly an editor's job to offer suggestions on the main body of a book - ask for fuller documentation, reorganize the narrative for greater impact, remove fat, and so on - interfering editorially in the preface and acknowledgements seems like butting in while the author is busy picking his nose. Can an editor chummily say to an author, 'I say, old fruit, you're being a bit gooey here, how about cutting out this crap?' Many editors are tempted to say something Bertie Woosterian like this, but desist. Apart from the restraint dictated by common politeness, and the fear of annoying an author, there is the temptation of leaving the fellow free to make an ass of himself if he seems hell-bent on it, or if he is vain and pretentious - which, among jet-setting academics, he often is. At other times one can be more simply embarrassed into editorial silence. One academic concludes his list of acknowledgements by thanking his personal physician, who, he says, cured him of piles, which, apart from giving him general relief, allowed him to write his book sitting down instead of lying. It was apparent in the unedited version of this author's acknowledgements that there had been two impediments to the completion of his book: his over-active children, and the problem in his backside. The first had been removed by him - he packed them off to their grandparents - while the second was alleviated by certain applications administered by his doctor. The editor who was handling this book raised the issue of editorial policy in relation to this sort of an acknowledgements page: the material was engagingly naïve of course, but it was also plainly idiotic - so should she advise the author to delete references to the specific posture in which his book was written and restrict his thanks to naming the Florence Nightingale of his posterior? Everyone who discussed the issue agreed in the end that discretion was the better part of advice, that this particular gem was too rare to be thrown out. We remembered a drily witty acknowledgements page in a famous academic book by Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, in which the authors said that but for their wives, their book would have been finished much sooner. The artlessness of our own author seemed inspired in comparison with this merely succinct cleverness. Some years ago The Economist published an essay titled 'Gratitude that Grates' which began, 'One of the easier ways to study the twin vices, fawning and vanity, is to leaf through authors' acknowledgements', and went on to list several authors who had worked themselves up into a frenzy of admiration for their editors. Often, this prefatorial enthusiasm can be heartfelt, but academics who also aspire to be well-published and well-edited know better than most that flattery will get them a long way and tend to lay it on thick. Book-editing has been described as an 'invisible art', and editorial good sense in such cases ought to mean gently asking the author to cool his ardour, but the temptation among editors of being made visible to the public as the writer's handmaiden is always rather delicious, and so the gushing author is seldom curtailed. According to The Economist, 'Academics routinely praise their patrons in terms which would have made medieval courtiers blush.' Devious self-promotion sometimes takes the form of a writer informing the reading public in his preface that the royalties from his book are being donated to charity. Such advertised altruism is avowedly to gain more book-buyers, but it is usually obvious from the start that the number of extra buyers gained through such proclamations is not worth bothering about. People buy books if the author is worth reading or if they want to buy them, not because they perceive virtue in authors who are flagrantly selfless. The opposite of this posturing approach is the one reported to have been adopted by Edward Ingram, the author of The Great Game in Asia, who bluntly says at the start of his book: 'Writers often thank their typists. I thank mine. Mrs George Cook is not a particularly good typist...the responsibility for any mistakes is mine but the fault is hers.' His anti-gush reaches oracular sublimity when he adds: 'Writers often thank their colleagues for their help. Mine have given none.' It is not known if Ingram was teaching in an Indian university campus when he wrote this.