Books: The Hell-Fire Clubs - Barbarians to Angels

They weren't exactly wholesome, Evelyn Lord shows, yet younger members of the royal family and future statesmen joined in these secret societies whose presiding figures were not Satan but Bacchus, Priapus and (to a genuinely alarming extent) Onan. So we're talking – a bit bathetically – David Cameron, Boris Johnson and the Bullingdon rather than Aleister Crowley and his Golden Dawn. But it's still fascinating to see from Lord's absorbing study how integral this sort of institutionalised decadence became to the fabric of the state at a crucial moment in its formation. "Dour" or not, Scotland was not to miss out: there's some intriguing discussion here of Fife's "Beggar's Benison" and of Edinburgh's "Knights of the Mortar and the Cape".

BARBARIANS TO ANGELS BY PETER S WELLS (Norton, 15.99)

WERE the Dark Ages really dark, or just "differently illuminated"? There's a definite whiff of political correctness about Peter Wells's denial of collapse in the centuries following the Romans' fall from power. Especially when he himself describes an early medieval Mad Max world in which the old temples and villas are quarried for building stone, turf-roofed hovel-cities are set up amidst the ruins, and pigs are grazed and vegetables grown in abandoned forums. And yet, eventually, you see what he means: there's so much archaeological data around to support the deliberate-downshift thesis.

Odd as it may seem to us now that Europe's peoples should have rejected the Roman way of life, there's abundant evidence that they did so by free choice. And also that they thrived in their own way, with bustling commerce, buoyant prosperity, harmonious trade and diplomatic relations, cultural sophistication and new creative energy. The Dark Ages, it seems, were very nearly a golden age.