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This adventurous trawl through back pages down the ages reveals an arena for settling scores, and the seeds of GoogleAn index is an arsy-versy tool: it enables us to sneak into a book from the rear end, saving the time it would take to advance through the text from the beginning. Jonathan Swift, quoted by Dennis Duncan in his witty and wide-ranging study of the subject, compares readers who use such short cuts to travellers entering a palace through the privy.In two less cloacal anecdotes, Duncan identifies the index as a convenient hiding place for academic backstabbers. During the 1690s, a snarky faction at Christ Church, Oxford, defamed the great philologist Richard Bentley by mocking up an index that gave page references for “his egregious dullness” or “his familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw”. This learned amusement still helps to pass the time in our ancient, addled universities. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, having spent an embattled few years in the 1980s as master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, revenged himself on his detested colleagues in the index to a book of essays, where he directed readers to “Peterhouse: high-table conversation not very agreeable, 46; main source of perverts, 113”. Continue reading...