Tom Holland is already waiting by JRR Tolkien’s grave when I arrive at the Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford. Leggy, languid, splayed across a bench with a book, wearing a worker jacket and paisley shirt, Holland is a postcard of English erudition. “Such a brilliant place for a rendezvous,” he grins with trademark enthusiasm.
We linger for a while, exchanging small talk about the Roman conquest of Judea, and eventually Dominic Sandbrook barrels up. Short, stocky, bluff — hobbit-like? — Sandbrook is wearing a suit, braces and Richard Nixon-themed cufflinks, as befits his budding transatlantic power historian status.
“This is a lot better than dressing up as Anne Boleyn,” Sandbrook chunters with characteristic gruffness. He is referencing the fact that the photoshoot for this piece was originally going to involve Britain’s two most popular historians dressing up as famous old double acts — Wellington and Napoleon, Henry VIII and Boleyn, and so forth. But as befits his grumpy bloke down the pub persona, Sandbrook nixed this idea.
Instead we agreed to make a pilgrimage from Oxford to Tolkien’s nearby grave, on account of our shared passion for the great author. Then Sandbrook vetoed this too, so we are just meeting at the grave for five minutes before decamping for a pint.
No one could accuse these two men — virtuoso authors and broadcasters, the Laurel and Hardy of upper-middlebrow historical banter — of shunning the limelight. But Sandbrook drew the line at wearing hosiery. Holland did not. This tells you something about the differences between them. It is also one reason their podcast, The Rest Is History, has done so preposterously well: Tom and Dom balance each other perfectly, embodying two very different British archetypes.
Holland, 55, is the patrician cavalier: cosmopolitan, Tiggerish, a cricketer, a southerner, a lover of the ancient and disciple of Catullus. Sandbrook, 48, is the yeoman roundhead: Eeyorish, a football man, a Midlander, a master of the modern and devotee of Stanley Baldwin. One of these men will wear a codpiece for clicks, the other will not. Put them together, however, and you have the world’s most successful history podcast.
There are lots of reasons to interview this pair. Holland has a new book out, Pax, the third in his vivid trilogy about the Roman Empire. Sandbrook almost certainly has a new book out as well, part of his Adventures in Time children’s series that has already ticked off Cleopatra and the Vikings. They’re also midway through a world tour of sold-out live shows that will take in Sydney and Washington.
But to me at least this is all incidental. The real reason to interview them is that, and excuse me if I sound a little excitable here, they have pretty much reinvented popular history for the modern age. There are many other flourishing history podcasts, mostly by blokes called Dan — Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Dan Snow’s History Hit —but none are as impactful as The Rest Is History. Holland and Sandbrook have created the new In Our Time; a witty, twice-weekly, hour-long broadcast that ranges across pretty much all of human history, from Thermopylae to Jeremy Thorpe via Tolkien and Tutankhamun, and has six million downloads a month from all over the world. The Rest Is History “club” also has 20,000 paying subscribers, who get extra content for $7.50 a month, and their fans range from Lord Frost to the Canadian pop star Grimes.
Crucially, more than half their audience is under 35: more centrist lad than centrist dad. Through a deft combination of chatty populism, sprawling erudition and truly heinous Marilyn Monroe impressions, these two bespectacled, middle-aged bookworms have somehow made history alluring, borderline sexy. Over 340 episodes they’ve covered Watergate, the rise of the Nazis and the soaring history of the pigeon. It is no small achievement.
One of these men will wear a codpiece for clicks, the other will not.
How they did it is the first thing I want to know when we sit down for lunch in the sunshine at the Trout Inn. Sandbrook peruses the menu while Holland marches to the bar to order a pair of “very frothy” Doom Bars. Reliably on brand as ever, Sandbrook orders a beef burger and Holland opts for a halloumi burger. What do they view as the source of their success?
Both find an answer in their own childhoods. Holland grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, where his father was a country solicitor and his mother an occupational therapist. He would kick a football around with his brother, James, a successful historian of the Second World War (and, er, podcaster), but books reigned over their imagination.
“I read obsessively,” Holland recalls. “There were no videos. The house was completely lacking in anything that might have distracted me from books.” His father was so old-fashioned that he viewed the newfangled ITV with suspicion.
“I cannot adequately put into words how obsessive I was about almost every period of history as a child,” Holland says. One of his earliest memories is sitting in a multi-story car park in Salisbury, looking around at all the concrete and wishing it was the Jurassic period. In fact he was so besotted with history that he chose not to study it at university, because he was worried that formal study would dampen his ardor.
Sandbrook is less of a fanatic character, but was similarly riveted by the past while growing up in a middle-class household in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. “History essays didn’t feel like homework to me,” he says. “I’d be busy doing extra work for them, drawing my little battle maps and whatnot.”
Neither man has lost this childish sense of wonder. It comes across in some of their sillier podcasts, such as when they did a World Cup of historical gods, but it also charges their storytelling with infectious boy’s own enthusiasm. “Think of the excitement of, say, Alexander the Great invading Persia,” Sandbrook says. “Some professional historians might think it juvenile to find that thrilling. But if you lose sight of that, you actually lose sight of why people are interested.”
What The Rest Is History has demonstrated is that there is still a real intellectual hunger in this country, and that it isn’t being fully served by the BBC. But it has to be packaged accessibly. Gen Zers will listen to four hours on the Hundred Years’ War if you leaven it with chaotic re-enactments from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel. People do want to know about the revolutions of 1848, but it will slip down a lot easier if it comes with Sir Christopher Clark, the regius professor of history at Cambridge, singing The Death of Robert Blum in a stirring baritone. And sure, chuck in an episode on history’s top ten eunuchs just for good measure.
The podcast has turned two good careers into great ones. After studying English literature at university Holland attempted to become a novelist, writing a book about Lord Byron and vampires. Bizarrely, it did not sell. “I realized that I was vastly more interested in history than I was in vampires,” he says.
His father was so old-fashioned that he viewed the newfangled ITV with suspicion.
He began writing popular history books about his childhood passions, the Roman and Persian empires, before having a brief flirt with notoriety when he published In the Shadow of the Sword, a book about the rise of Islam, and appeared in a documentary that questioned assumptions about the life of Muhammad. The show provoked a “firestorm” of death threats. “I never want to write about Islam again,” he says. “It was horrible. It was just endless people telling me I’m a racist, for years.”
The theme that has increasingly come to fixate Holland is Christianity. His last book, Dominion, is about the central — and in his view underrated — role that Christianity played and continues to play in Western thought and morality. It is a running joke in the podcast — Tom banging on about Jesus again — but it is also clearly a powerful motivating force in his life, despite his lack of faith in God. “I’ve come to recognize myself as being so Christian in all my assumptions that I would now identify as a Christian,” he says, in perhaps the most Tom Holland sentence ever uttered. “The way I don’t believe is a form of belief.”
In another life and century Holland would have made a simply magnificent Victorian parson. You can just imagine him launching blistering sermons from his pulpit every Sunday, being mooned over by all the crinolined young women, dragging his wife, Sadie, and their two girls across Dorset on hunts for dinosaur fossils. “I’ve always been happier in the past,” he says.
Sandbrook initially went down a more traditional academic path, doing a PhD on Vietnam War-era America at Cambridge and becoming a lecturer at Sheffield University. But the life of a jobbing academic didn’t quite suit his ambition. This dawned on him aged 30, when his head of department informed him that he was just a couple of years from taking over the admissions committee. “The thought of being dragged into that bureaucracy filled me with terror,” he says. “I remember thinking I would genuinely rather write the kind of books you see at airports, a life of Gary Neville or something.” He didn’t like the idea of becoming a “career academic that nobody has ever heard of”.
In fact neither of these voluble men has much time for the hushed shades of academe. The feeling is often mutual. “There are a number of academics who hold me in very low regard,” Sandbrook says gravely. The backbiting may in part be down to envy. “Academics have suffered probably a bigger decline in income and status than almost any other group in the past 50 years,” Sandbrook says. Ouch.
Fortunately an old Cambridge supervisor recommended Sandbrook to the super-agent Andrew Wylie, who saw potential in his muscular prose and fascination with the interplay between politics and culture. The result was a series of very good books about postwar Britain, spanning the Suez crisis to the Falklands conflict.
The pair first met at a charity quiz in 2005, sitting on the Little, Brown publishing table, and their families got to know each other (Sandbrook has a son with his wife, Catherine; Holland’s daughter Eliza spent all of Sandbrook’s wedding following Catherine around and “is in all the photos”). But their professional symbiosis began in 2020, when Holland was on holiday in Cornwall with his brother, James, who was rhapsodizing about his own podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, which features him and the comedian-cum-historian Al Murray minutely dissecting the Second World War.
Both were suspicious at first. “I was contemptuous,” Sandbrook says. “I’d never listened to podcasts. I still don’t listen to podcasts.” Holland regarded the medium as “somehow illegitimate”.
Yet they gave it a spin and the podcast landed at a perfect moment. It was the middle of the pandemic, when long walks and cooking marathons dominated daily life. I can remember chopping garlic in my kitchen, listening to Holland and Sandbrook wang on about 17th-century coffee houses, and having the intoxicating sense that I was at the pub with my two most intelligent mates.
And it was also in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, as history and its uses became a matter of fierce and urgent debate, the vehicle through which we debate the morality of the present day.
For this reason, the mostly gentle anti-wokery of The Rest Is History is also critical to its appeal. The podcast acts as a kind of culture war bromide, taking the sting out of progressive passions by putting history in its proper context, instead of viewing it as a modern morality play. Sandbrook and Holland regularly tell the story of the British Empire, but they do so without rending their garments, or dwelling exclusively on the darkest moments.
I mention my colleague Sathnam Sanghera and the thesis of his book Empireland — that Britain has never properly acknowledged its imperial past. “That’s bollocks, total bollocks, you can quote me on that,” Sandbrook says. “The empire was barely ever off TV in the Seventies and Eighties. Even at the time every great imperial episode was attended with enormous political controversy.” The difference, he argues, is that empire wasn’t discussed with the “oppressive earnestness” that dominates today.
I point out that I studied the Nazis and the Tudors endlessly through school and university, but never the British Empire (though that would likely be different today). “Schools have incredibly limited time,” Sandbrook retorts. “Schools have very limited resources. They’re often nervous about teaching empire. It is blindingly obvious why people teach the Tudors and the Nazis to 12-year-olds — because 12-year-olds find them really interesting.”
They are similarly dismissive of the suggestion that The Rest Is History is too blokey. The show has plenty of female guests on, from Katja Hoyer on East Germany to Mary Beard on ancient Greece, but it is undeniably a bit laddy at times. Do they have a woman problem? “If you look at our guests, we don’t have a woman problem at all,” Holland says. “Obviously, neither of us are women. If it’s a problem that neither of the presenters are women, then we have a woman problem, but I like to think I’m in touch with my feminine side.” Or as Sandbrook puts it: “We’re pretty gender fluid.”
What about elevating more marginal voices? “There are other podcasts out there,” Sandbrook says. “It’s not our fault that people choose to listen to ours. You know, I do my best to put them off.”
Sandbrook and Holland are refreshingly unwilling to apologize for who they are, which again is part of their appeal. “We are British, we are white, we are male, we are middle class,” Holland says. “We come from a particular culture and we are perforce shaped by that. The best form of objectivity we could have is to recognize we could never be truly objective.”
Naturally, when I told fellow journalists I was interviewing this pair, the question they all wanted me to ask was how much money are they making? “Hmm, not enough,” Sandbrook says.
Which means they’re coining it, of course. The podcast economy is a pyramid — most don’t make much, but those at the top make a lot indeed. Podcasts can do particularly well when they are part of a network that sells advertising bundles. In this case The Rest Is History belongs to Goalhanger Podcasts, a stable run by one Gary Lineker and his business partners. The duo don’t actually have that many dealings with the footballer turned podcast mogul, though. “He is an Olympian figure,” Holland says. “Occasionally thundering his approval by retweeting us, but otherwise veiled by clouds.”
“I’m in touch with my feminine side.”
Sources with close knowledge of the podcast estimate that Sandbrook and Holland are clearing almost $90,000 a month each, with a similar cut going to the Olympian Lineker. Sandbrook’s response to this financial estimate is to give a hollow laugh and ask if I got it from the Liz Truss School of Accountancy. Holland is far too English to address this directly, but admits that he rarely bothers with presenting television any more because it “takes too long and pays badly”. He also acknowledges that he now finds it “easier” to persuade his wife, Sadie, to let him indulge his passion for buying Anglo-Saxon coins. He was recently caught on camera dancing with joy after spending $4,400 to acquire a 120 million-year-old Psittacosaurus fossil at an auction. This man is a totemic dork.
Their fiercest competition comes from their Goalhanger stablemates Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, whose copycat podcast The Rest Is Politics now often pips them to the top of the UK charts. Sandbrook sees them as rather parochial competitors. “I do think it’s very cruel that some people say Campbell and Stewart don’t have global reach,” he tells me en route to their US tour. “Not all podcasts play well in Dublin, New York and Sydney. Some are made for Harrogate, and there’s no shame in that.”
This kind of elevated lad bantz is the magic dust of The Rest Is History, along with an extended gag about whether the First World War started because Kaiser Wilhelm wore the wrong shoes to Cowes Week. But there is a moral seriousness beneath the silliness. About history and how it should be studied. About Britain and what it represents. About the civilizing pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment for all, not just the elites. (I will say, having attended a Rest Is History live show, that I did recognize a lot of barristers and Old Etonians, and I think at least one Old Etonian barrister, so they might not be quite as populist as all that.)
Amid all the “hurrah for Blighty, down with the French” bluster, though, Holland and Sandbrook take their own culture seriously. They’ve told a picaresque tale of our national history and mythology, full of adventure and swashbuckle, populated by General Gordon, Oliver Cromwell, the Black Prince, William Wilberforce, Agatha Christie and the perennial John Bull. Is it a bit glossy at times? Perhaps. But I’m extremely glad they’ve done it, somehow capturing the splendid and tragic absurdity of the entire human story in the process.
“When people look at the past now and they say, ‘Oh gosh, they behaved very badly,’ I kind of think, what do you expect?” Sandbrook says. “People will always behave poorly and selfishly. There is a darkness there. I see it in people I know. I see it in myself.”
And yet they always find light amid this darkness. “Probably, if we had to sum history up, the tone would be that it is a very, very dark comedy,” Holland says. My only regret is that we didn’t get to see him dressed as Anne Boleyn.
Josh Glancy is the Washington bureau chief for The Sunday Times of London