How do I use the web? With extreme care! That said, the classical texts on Perseus are invaluable, and the opportunity to order obscure books from universities you've never heard of unbelievably useful. It is good also to have the chance to do things like this, communicating with people who share your passions.

As for the difference between academic and popular history - well, in the field of classics, I think it boils down to the fact that it is the responsibility of the academic, as often as not, to point out what we DON'T know - whereas I have sought, wherever possible, to paper over the cracks, and to do what the ancient historians themselves, in the main, sought to achieve, which was to write a gripping narrative. Nevertheless, the difference is not perhaps so extreme as I am making it: in the field of Achaemenid studies, for instance, the scholarly resurrection of the Persian Empire that has taken place over the past few decades has depended on a methodology that is not SO far removed from what I do: sifting the evidence, piecing fragments together, attempting to make them whole.