One has grown used to reading the kind of revisionist history in which the Renaissance was a myth, the Reformation never happened and the great Irish famine was a spot of food shortage. Britain blundered into ruling India by a series of unfortunate oversights, and Attila the Hun was by no means as bad as he has been painted.

Related: Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?

Hardly a word of rebuke passes Benner’s lips – this is revisionism with a vengeance