When were the real Dark Ages? I only ask because there's recently been such a spate of books about the barbarism unleashed by the fall of the Roman Empire that we now know almost as much about that period as we do about Heston Blumenthal's kitchen hygiene. And it appears that the only difference between the Europe of the Dark Ages and The Fat Duck is that the restaurant is the more dangerous environment of the two.

Aficionados of barbarism have certainly been served up a rich feast these past few months. As well as Tom Holland's Millennium, there's been Chris Wickham's magisterial The Inheritance of Rome, James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, Judith Herrin's history of Byzantium, now in paperback, and, just before Christmas we had Christopher Kelly's gripping biography of Attila the Hun.

But, as ignorance about Attila, and indeed the whole barbarian host, is now evaporating under sustained scholarly scrutiny, is there any age left that we can still call dark? Are there any periods of history that are now lost to our gaze, their mysteries veiled and shrouded from our eyes?

Well, the pat answer is almost all of it. A recent survey by one history professor at a Russell Group university showed that less than 10 per cent of his students could name a single 19th-century prime minister and the vast majority could name neither the monarch at the time of the Spanish Armada or the British Commander at Waterloo.

But at least there are popular historians labouring to lift the veil of ignorance from these periods. And cinema too is casting a flickering light on these eras. Whether it is Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth or Paul Bettany as Melbourne in the ravishing The Young Victoria, Tudor history and the politics of the 19th century do still permeate our popular culture.

The one age that doesn't, however, is the time Britain was born. The period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 is one of the most colourful in our history. It is populated by figures of romance and villainy, from the scheming Duchess of Marlborough to the man who raised the grubby craft of political corruption to a baroque art, Robert Walpole. It was the period during which the Bank of England, parliamentary parties, a national press and the United Kingdom itself were established. It was the age of some of our most sublime writers, from Defoe and Swift to Pope and Dryden. And it was the period that attracted, in the last two centuries, two of our greatest historians, Thomas Macaulay and his great-nephew George Trevelyan. Yet popular ignorance of this era is now almost total. Mention Queen Anne and all most people will think of is rectories in Wiltshire. Is there any other time in our history that was once so enthusiastically, and profitably, studied and yet is now so neglected?

Hats have it

Jack Straw was interviewed in the Daily Mail the other week and all the cleverest men in Westminster, who know all there is to be knowed, pored over his carefully constructed utterances for evidence that he was preparing a leadership bid. I didn't read a word of the interview, and for all I know Jack was declaring martial law and his own appointment as Lord Protector with immediate effect, but none of that mattered, because I was spellbound by the picture. There was a front-rank politician, always polite with with his words and seemly in his carriage, caught doing something on camera I thought no one with any residual political ambitions would ever, ever dare do.

He was wearing a hat. A big black fedora, in fact.

Ever since John F. Kennedy turned up hatless for his own presidential inauguration, headgear and success in political leadership just haven't gone together. As William Hague has often reminded me.

Yet there was Jack in his rather jazzily handsome number. Which is identical, I have to say, to the hats worn regularly by both Vince Cable and Ken Clarke. Say what you like about that trio, you have to accept that they're three of their respective parties' strongest, and most popular performers. There's something about their mix of maturity and insouciance that endears them even to opponents. Now that all three are out there as proud fedora-fanciers, perhaps it's time that we revised the orthodoxy that has held, unbroken, since January 1961. Is it now the case that if you do want to get ahead in politics you should get a hat?

To the left of Attila

One more point on the Dark Ages. About Attila. It's become a bit of cliché that those of us crusty old fossils who, for example, don't want Fidel Castro knighted or Eric Hobsbawm beatified are “to the right of Attila the Hun”, as though Attila were a prototype reactionary icon, a Dark Age Denis Thatcher, remembered by his friends for ordering a fermented mare's blood and tonic at the Samarkand Golf Club before denouncing the Visigoths for taking our jobs and women.

But actually history teaches us that Attila was no conservative. After all, he ran a collective that had little respect for property rights or the rule of law and his policies certainly accelerated the break-up of a great many nuclear families. If anyone should feel comfortable in that sort of milieu I would have thought it was Fidel and Eric...

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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