Historians are from Mars and political scientists are from Venus (or was it the other way round?). The most striking feature of Erik Jones's stimulating and generous response to my article is the way in which it highlights the divergent approaches to the postwar era adopted by historians and political scientists. In many respects, this is a very good thing. We need the stimuli provided by those rooted in different traditions bringing their distinctive approaches to the same subject matter, just as, for the early medieval period, historians, archaeologists and literary scholars confront the fragmentary evidence of post-Roman Europe in contrasting but often mutually enriching ways.