ABSTRACT
I was going to close this piece with advice to the young scholar that you should always take your work seriously but never yourself. I put it here instead to express my apprehensions in doing this. I think it is useful to have on record comments on how careers that were lucky enough to emerge successfully unfolded, but there is the danger that the person in question will be taken, and will take him or herself, too seriously. To have succeeded in studying something or other has never made anyone intrinsically interesting; indeed I find some of my successful colleagues terrible bores.
