"Unless you take the view that only attitude matters and veracity does not, this is not work of publishable quality in any defensible view, and the publishers need to reflect on how they identified peer-reviewers. This booklet trumpets forth the very opposite of the proper critical approaches responsible academics try to instil in the students they seek to educate: respect for and care with evidence and interpretative methods – ie ensuring that you know what you are talking about; reading secondary sources with care and objectivity – not seeing only what you are looking for whether it is there or not, or cherry-picking references. ‘Post-truth’ is the disreputable realm to which this profoundly deficient work belongs, and it should be treated as such."

"This book contains some very good observations but it is marred by an ideological immobilism that has led the author to misrepresent some of the secondary literature. It should be handled with care."

So, what did I make of Professor Oosthuizen’s book? The initial shock is its size; at less than 150pp I was expecting a brief polemic, and read on with an increasing degree of astonishment at the breadth of knowledge and the depth of research it contained, marshalling arguments for and against the traditional views of a radically changed social, political and economic post-Roman landscape.