Eleanor has spent most of her adult life reading other people's paperwork: parish registers, ships' manifests, court depositions, quartermasters' inventories — documents written by clerks who had no notion that anyone would ever look. She arrived at history sideways, through a family question that turned out to have a dull answer and a very interesting paper trail, and never quite left.
What holds her attention is disagreement. A battle has three surviving accounts and they contradict each other about the hour, the weather and who gave the order; most retellings quietly choose one and move on. Eleanor's instinct is to keep all three and say plainly which parts are solid, which are inference, and which are somebody's later tidying-up. Readers occasionally write in to complain that she never told them what really happened. She takes this as evidence the piece worked.
Her working rule is that the gaps belong to the story. For almost everyone who has ever lived, the record runs out immediately and completely. When it does, she says so in the text instead of filling the silence with atmosphere. She is suspicious of any historical anecdote that is too well-shaped, and keeps a running list of claims that everybody repeats and nobody sources. Several have become articles. A few, irritatingly, turned out to be true.
She is slow, and the section moves at her pace. She lives in Edinburgh, walks a great deal in weather that does not reward it, and has strong opinions about footnotes.
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