A major national US magazine wants me to write 3,000 words based on my book. Everything has to be sourced and annotated, even though the footnotes don't appear in the article. And not just quoting my book. It means a lot of work and visits to the British Library.

Is this enormous carefulness better than the gung ho attitude of the British press? It does tend to stifle creativity if you're into painting word pictures. When I was writing for a (different but also very good) US magazine I was bemused to be asked for documentation to iprove the exact dates of the "early Victorian" house I was referring to, and having to explain how I knew that the berries in the hedgerows were blackberries and not some other kind of berries.