I do not state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him.

For a forgotten fact is news when it comes again.

Writers of books have the fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the remark, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to need repeating here." They know that that is not true.

It is a low kind of flattery.

They know that the reader has forgotten every detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge.