How sadly true...

Every now and again someone summons up the energy to write out a fairly comprehensive account of a field as a monograph. This provides a huge service, by giving a systematic account of a field to which one can then refer. Very frequently it also misrepresents the literature somewhat, because an author is almost bound to adopt a particular, uniform context in his monograph, and many of the theorems that he proves will be true under weaker conditions.

B. Davies, Whither Mathematics?