«Yet Greeks and philhellenes who dicuss Hellenism and nationalism in the Byzantine context have always risked rebuke from the Great powers of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies for daring to entertain Great Ideas about national and cultural continuity. At the time of Greek Independence there was Jacob Fallmerayer, who denied that the modern Greeks were of Hellenic descent. Since the Second World War there has been the “Neo-Fallmerayerism” of a succession of distinguished Byzantinists who have felt obliged, in public lectures and book reviews, to point out that Byzantium was not a nation and that most of its people had no time for Hellenism… It is confined to Britain and to a generation which witnessed the end of british imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it has found little echo on the continent of Europe or in the New World, where there is perhaps greater sympathy for the problems of disrupted or insecure nationhood.»