The puzzle of PhDs

Dear Editor,

It’s pretty clear that historians can’t win, especially if they have the audacity to use a doctoral thesis as the basis for a book. As I read Aviva Tuffield’s puzzling review (ABR, December 2003/January 2004) of Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, and Wright’s understandably puzzled response (ABR, February 2004), I was reminded of a debate that occurred over several issues of ABR in 2002, which spawned plenty of silly generalisations about the quality of writing in PhD theses, but not much else.