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Peter, in full flight:

"The quest for Islamic conquest has been going on for 1400 years. The Crusades, for example, often portrayed as pure unprovoked Western Christian villainy (and there were, of course, some awful atrocities) without reference to that all important historical context that they were preceded by four centuries of unremitting Islamic conquest that subjugated the Arabian peninsula and then what used to be the centre of gravity of the Christian world, the Middle East and North Africa, vanquishing the Zoroastrian empire in Persia, extending later into Europe with the conquest of Spain, the Balkans and – most bloody of all – the Indian subcontinent. The Crusades were a belated and limited pushback."

This is a comic book version of history in which a satanic force, unlike any other, sprang out of some dark souk and, like an amalgam of Dracula and a zombie, started on an unrelenting, endlessly devious and fanatical, multi-millenia world conquest obsession. It's dramatic, it's exciting, it's got colour and motion, but it's not history.

If Peter thinks that's not right then he ought to produce a reading list of solid, respectable historians from whom he derives his vision. He's quoted elsewhere a few Fox News favourites but he has not presented a serious historian. He seems to think Tom Holland is a serious historian but he's not, he's a prolific producer of mass-market popular histories. An actual historian, Glen Bowersock, described his method thus: "a swashbuckling style that aims more to unsettle his readers than to instruct them ... irresponsible and unreliable".

Now that sounds like the kind of thing to get the juices running, primed and ready for some earth-shaking battles. Serious and sensible adults though should look elsewhere.