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I have been encouraged by the investigative Elizabethan-era biographies of such modern luminaries as Charles Nicholl, who has given readers wonderful studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe; A.L. Rowse, whose hundred or so stimulating books, some wonderful (Elizabethan Court and Country) and some not (Shakespeare the Man), have instructed, delighted, and enraged thousands; and Dennis Flynn, whose brilliant but still controversial work on the life of John Donne and his connection with the Catholic nobility has broken new ground. Barbara W. Tuchman remains a constant inspiration, particularly because of her all-too-neglected The Practice of History (1981). I should also mention the amazing Erroll Morris. His investigative documentary films (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure) are legendary. But I was particularly inspired by a long three-part piece he wrote for the New York Times—“Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?”—in which he investigated the real story behind two before-and-after sepia photographs taken by Simon Fenton in 1854 during the famous charge of the Light Brigade of the Crimean War. In this book-length essay, Morris showed how tiny moments in time can be recaptured and put together a century or more later, in a way that reveals what really happened during, between, and after those moments—provided that one is sufficiently fascinated by the question of what really happened and is compelled to dig at and scrutinize the material in microscopic detail repeatedly until what is there emerges. (There is, of course, never any guarantee that anything important will be uncovered—or that anything ever even existed. One simply follows one’s educated suspicions as far as they will go, disallowing one’s wishful thinking about fruitful outcomes.) Years after I began investigating the murder of this supposed patron of Shakespeare’s company, who in 1594 was on schedule to become the king of England, I discovered that Morris had given me the perfect model for arranging all of my minuscule pieces of evidence pertaining to the murder into a story that somebody might want to read. I owe this discovery to my friend, the preeminent photographer of Asia, Nevada Wier.