The other five books sit somewhere in between the two poles of interpretation represented by Goffart and Heather — that Germanic invasion was decisive in the fall of the West (Heather), or that it played little part in provoking the changes of the day (Goffart). Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568, for instance, is a serious student textbook which accepts that invasion played a very significant part in the dissolution of the empire, but also sees much fourth- and fifth-century change as coming from within Roman society. While very clear, and with the huge advantage of engaging seriously with archaeological evidence, this is not a book aimed at the general reader, since it engages in detail with directions in past and present scholarship. Adrian Goldsworthy's The Fall of the West, by contrast, is the only work by a professional author, rather than a university-based academic. It is aimed (in the manner of Tom Holland) at a reading public that enjoys ancient history. I was disappointed by it, and I don't think this is just because I am a supercilious academic anxious to maintain a closed shop. It has a well-researched and readable narrative of events, starting at the end of the second century, and it ends with a "Simple Answer" to why the empire failed, and an "Even Simpler Moral" for our times — Rome fell because Romans lost their sense of purpose and came to hold power for its own sake, rather than for the greater good of the state. But these strong conclusions are only spelled out in any detail in two short final chapters of about ten pages each. 

Christopher Kelly's Attila the Hun and James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire both illustrate perfectly how changing one's perspective can radically change one's view of this period. Both authors turn the tables on the usual "victims" of the dissolution of the empire, the Romans. Christopher Kelly tells the story of one of the West's great bogeymen, Attila the Hun, presenting him as a thoughtful and effective political and military leader, quite capable of outmanoeuvring his Roman adversaries — partly because they held a mistaken faith in their innate superiority over barbarians like him. The reputation of Attila is indeed interesting. As with Richard III, for most of us, no amount of scholarly ink can ever wash him and his Huns entirely clean of mythic horror. But there are other points of view. Among the Hungarians, whose language and identity derive from a similar group of nomadic invaders, the Huns are seen (with some justification) as very distant cousins, and Attila is viewed as a great ruler. A student of mine, who spent part of a gap year helping in a Budapest primary school, was amused to find three little boys named Attila among her charges. James O'Donnell's barbarian perspective is even stronger, though the group he chooses to defend is not the Huns, but one of the best-documented Germanic peoples, the Ostrogoths. In its US edition, his Ruin of the Roman Empire bears the subtitle: "The emperor who brought it down, the barbarians who could have saved it." For O'Donnell it was a Roman emperor, Justinian, who definitively destroyed the Roman empire. By invading the Ostrogoths' successor kingdom in Italy, he crushed a potential ally and destroyed the possibility of the world continuing to live in peace and prosperity.  Here the defenders of civilization are the barbarian Ostrogoths and the destructive invaders are Romans — east Romans (from Constantinople) under Justinian. 

Of my own The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization I can hardly provide a dispassionate judgment: its most original and contentious chapters are those that argue for an "end of civilization" (defined as a dramatic drop in living standards) as a result of the disintegration of the empire. Some serious reviewers have liked the book, others have found it (with some cause) over-egged, or (with less cause) over-interested in the material things of life. The only way I believed I could confidently, and objectively, judge my book to have triumphed over the other six we are considering was in its brevity. But closer research leads me to question even this. The next shortest book, Christopher Kelly's Attila the Hun, is 50 pages longer and is almost twice as thick — but, when one opens it up, the print is generous and the paper bulky. It is one of those books that the publishers have decided to pad out, to make it look more substantial than it really is. Why they think we appreciate this unnecessary overloading of our bookcases, I do not know. 

The influence of publishers, seeking to attract the market, is certainly present in the dramatic titles and lurid covers of almost all these books — Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 is the only honourable exception, with its descriptive title and a low-key cover, presumably because, as a textbook, it is actually meant to look serious. I am definitely guilty of allowing my publisher (the highly reputable Oxford University Press) to influence the packaging of my book. I had intended the second half of my title to read "and the End of a Civilization", but somehow, somewhere along the line, the "a" dropped out when the book was being edited, and the all-engulfing "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" was proposed. I was all too easily persuaded that this was more striking (rather than less honest), and at the same time my own suggestion for a cover illustration for the hard-back edition, a mournful and lyrical Fuseli drawing of the artist despairing over the ruin of the Roman past, was replaced by an apocalyptic 19th-century image of the sack of a city, with large-scale massacre under way and a strong suggestion of rape to come. Publishers know their trade and, I presume, are right in thinking that potential readers need to be hit firmly in the eye, but it is striking how easily sober academics can be seduced down a populist path.