Brilliantly written, wonderfully accessible for non-classicists, and extremely thoroughly argued through one of the most complete primary source analyses I've ever read. The book would have benefitted slightly from keeping the thread of its primary argument (that changes wrought by Rome's relationship with the Germanic confederacies north of the Rhine and Danube and the rise of Hunnic power in the 350s ultimately brought about Rome's fall, rather than internal political decay) more present throughout its content-heavy chapters, but nevertheless a wonderful read.

Four stars - I really liked it. If, like me, you always wanted to know how most of Europe transitioned from a single entity dominated by Rome to the patchwork of numerous kingdoms which it remained up until the nineteenth century, then this is the book for you.

In a nutshell, the Roman Empire was destroyed by barbarians because of qualities of the barbarians, not because of any incipient weakness or any other quality inherent to the empire. I can't judge how original this is for people familiar with the field, but for me it was a completely novel way of looking at a central event in world history, that I didn't even know was open to question.

Maybe this deserves 5 stars... I didn't appreciate the massive detail of political intrigues and economic developments over 2 centuries perhaps as much as I should have, or the work that goes into making such erudition even comprehensible to a non-expert.

A long haul. Infodump. Still interesting, but stressful

Enormously enjoyable - Heather's is a witty, imaginative and ultimately persuasive account of this stretch of tumultuous history. He argues the limitations of the Roman state in the 4th century were the same as they always had been; what was new was the political development of the Barbarians - itself driven by intimate contact with the Romans over the preceding centuries.

Particularly impressive is the way Heather makes both the archeological record and contemporary sources compellingly vivid - in these passages he has a novelist's imagination and feel for narrative. An account of an Imperial diplomatic mission to Attila the Hun fraught with more murderous double-dealing and bluff than a James Bond novel is one example; another is how Heather teases out from an early medieval hagiography of St Severinus the realities of life in a remote yet relatively peaceful backwater Roman province as the political centre imploded.