A couple of months ago, the eminent classicist Mary Beard was at the heart of a thunderous Twitterstorm. The BBC had made a cartoon film about Roman Britain for schoolchildren, featuring a family which their publicity blurb described, at one point, as typical; and the head of the family, a senior officer in the Roman army, was black.

When tweeters and bloggers accused the BBC of political correctness, Prof Beard leapt to its defence, saying that this could have been an officer from Algeria. And then all hell broke loose.

For those of us who are neither experts on Roman Britain nor professional headbangers, two simple conclusions seem to have emerged from an otherwise unedifying row. The first is that it’s certainly possible (though not at all typical) that some Romans who came here might have been dark-skinned enough to count as black. And the second is that a kind of politically correct manipulation of history is taking place in our culture. Getting present-day people to “relate” to the past is now a high priority; so the past, it seems, must be adapted to suit the present.

I don’t know whether that BBC series has reached the Tudors yet, but if and when it does, I hope the film-makers will read Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors very carefully. For while she shows that the number of black people in Tudor England was greater than we ever thought, she also demonstrates that most of the things we were previously told about them were either false or misleading.