Alfred Edward Housman was Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge from 1911 until his death in 1936, and to the wider public the author of A Shropshire Lad. His scholarly prefaces are famous for their invective: between 1903 and 1930 he published a five-volume critical edition of the Roman poet Manilius’s Astronomicon, and used its opening preface to flay editors who cited manuscripts selectively. The drunkard-and-lamppost image is his sharpest line in that vein — aimed not at statisticians but at critics who lean on evidence instead of reading it.