What I detest most is people who have no proper training as historians but call themselves historians, call for large-scale analysis, and in fact cross into the territory of ideology. There are quite a lot classicists in this category (e.g., Tom Holland, who is apparently unaware that if you want to claim that, say, events in the distant past influence ourselves, you have to prove a continuity from then to now, which they invariably forget).

Those people claim a certainty they cannot offer and claim to be something they are not. That’s what I do not like. O’Reilly, on the other hand, admits how preciously little we know. I find that honesty sympathetic.

I stopped ordering ‘historical’ books to review for Amazon, because they are so often based on a dearth of primary sources as well as being thinly footnoted, if at all.

Such historical spinning might be acceptable in the form of historical novels, which can be very enjoyable, and there is no attempt to disguise what is plainly fiction, as ‘history’.