Noel Coward said that having to read a footnote "resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love" (according to the back-cover blurb on Anthony Grafton's The Footnote), but I'd say it's more like being invited downstairs by the erudite widow below, who has a superb library and a broad oak desk covered with papers and file folders and a typewriter, and brews coffee while discussing her approach to an intricate historical problem she's currently writing about