She doesn’t allow herself to become fixated on anti-Semitism, however. She is at pains to remind us that the myth of the “stolen legacy” itself is by no means wholly victimless. It robs the ancient Greeks of the credit for their foremost achievements; it portrays traditional historians as either dishonest or hopelessly brainwashed.

She also points out that the willingness to jettison traditional scholarship was not a simple phenomenon. It was powered not only by compensatory politics but also by postmodernism — “the idea that facts are really nothing more than opinions”. In effect, as she puts it, she had run into a storm created by “two different weather systems on American campuses”, one political and one intellectual.

Postmodernism, far from being a mere fad, can have dangerous consequences. This is one of the things that History Lesson warns us against. But the book is not just a cautionary tale. It is also a heartening reminder of how much can be accomplished, in the face of intimidation and appeasement, by principled resistance.