Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

academics often play a role in those middle and upper levels of the chain, influencing people with the audiences of a hundred thousand to a million like... Tom Holland who inspire the filmmakers and TV directors...

Funnily enough, I've noticed (on Twitter) that Halsall seems to reserve the absolute pinnacle of his disdain for Tom Holland in particular!

I can see that the formation of opinion and popular cultural and political understanding of the past operates on multiple levels, and over considerable periods of time. But I still don't think that any academic historians working on the 'fall of rome' era at the moment (as far as I'm aware, and I would welcome suggestions) is putting out work that could be appropriated by political extremists, whatever personal feuds they might have with each other; the political and cultural ramifications of the era are too well known, and the debate too closely contested.

We can only hope that more popular historians and writers are as scrupulous!