Hearts will sink among historians of early Christianity and late antiquity, as well as medievalists and, needless to say, Byzantinists, when they see the title of this pugnacious and energetically written book.

The words “darkening age” evoke everything they have been trying for years to overturn, implying as they do the notion of the “dark ages”, when the glories of classical civilisation were supposedly obliterated for centuries, until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment made possible the triumph of Western European liberalism and secularism.