The Rest Is History's Tom Holland: ‘History doesn't exist to teach us moral lessons'

Telegraph

15-02-2025

Sitting in Tom Holland's study, I am puzzled. Looking around, I can see a suit of chain mail (a present from his brother and fellow popular historian James Holland), a mounted psittacosaurus fossil (120 million years old), and a signed photograph of Ian Botham. But ­although the high-ceilinged room is a dozen bookshelves high, there is no sign of a ladder.
How does he reach the books on the top shelves? 'Oh, I just clamber up if I want something.' Perhaps this is the Tom Holland they should have cast as Spider-Man.
But then this Tom Holland might find film-star pay cheques rather paltry these days. In 2023, The Times estimated that, as the co-host of the phenomenally popular podcast The Rest Is History – number one in the Apple podcast charts most weeks – he was earning £70,000 a month. 'A gentleman never discusses his financial affairs,' he says when I ask if the ­figure is correct, 'but I would say that I feel more financially secure from the podcast than I do from translating Latin texts.'
It's one of his less remunerative projects I'm here to discuss – a new translation for Penguin Classics of The Lives of the Caesars, a gossipy, often racy biography of 12 rulers of the Roman Empire, from Julius ­Caesar to the emperor Domitian, written by the historian Suetonius in AD 121. It replaces the 1957 Penguin translation by Robert Graves, and is 'a kind of homage' to Graves, whose 1934 novel I, Claudius did much to kindle 11-year-old Tom's ­fascination with ancient Rome.
It's thanks to Suetonius, he says, that the ancient Romans still enthral us. 'It's not just that he portrays them in terms of melodrama and Grand Guignol – although he often does – but we feel we know these people because he describes their personal traits in a way that would be inconceivable with a pharaoh or a shah. We know what they ate, their sexual tastes, how they urinated – there's almost no detail too personal or intimate that Suetonius doesn't give to us.'
Holland's beautifully fluent translation is compulsively read­able throughout, but, naturally, it's the most outlandish moments that stick in the memory: Caligula complaining that a man sentenced to be devoured by wild beasts is making too much noise, and cutting his tongue out before throwing him back; Nero stabbing strangers in the street for fun. Even Augustus, nicest of the lot, demanded a steady supply of virgins to deflower.
'The more you learn about the Romans, the more alien they seem to us, who inherit our morality and cultural assumptions from Christianity,' says Holland. 'So it seems mad to sit in moral judgment on them. They were by our lights unspeakably callous, but there was a kind of innocent quality to their callousness, I think. Their understanding of what it was to be callous was very different from ours.'
Bespectacled and boyish, Holland is 57 but could pass for 35, or, when enthusiastically showing me his Roman coin collection, about 14. On the day we chat in his study in south London, the rest of the world is glued to the Trump inauguration. He thinks this modern ­Caesar is foreshadowed in Suetonius 'to the degree that you can read this and see how far a brutal sense of humour and an understanding of people who are despised by other politicians can get you. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero covered a wide political spectrum, but they made people like them by making them laugh and going over the heads of priggish, humourless elites.'
More interested in reading history for pleasure than analysing it, Holland chose to study English rather than history at Cambridge, then spent several years as a ­struggling novelist: 'I was very dependent on the support of a good woman – my wife, Sadie' (at the time a BBC producer, now a midwife). His fortunes turned when he segued into history, producing bestsellers such as Rubicon, Dynasty, Dominion, and Pax.
Academic historians, although they largely give his books warm reviews, sometimes complain of a lack of analysis – 'which is like saying, 'This is a travel guide to India, I wish it was a travel guide to China.' I write narrative history.' He makes use of the novelist's ability to get inside the heads of the people he writes about. 'I think it's a real problem, for instance, that historians raised in a materialist, sceptical tradition leave out of their analysis the fact that people believed stuff that would seem insane to us. But if you write from the perspective that Athene is real, if you can introduce the gods or angels or miracles into the fabric of the story, then hopefully you can give a better sense of what these people were like and how their societies functioned.'
He started The Rest Is History with Dominic Sandbrook, the 20th-­century specialist, as a lockdown project in 2020. Like Augustus, he has spawned a dynasty: copycat podcasts include The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Entertainment. 'They're good, but I'm proud that ours is the only one with a name that actually makes sense as an English phrase.'
All of these podcasts are made by Gary Lineker's company Goalhanger. Occasionally, they are recorded in front of a live audience. 'We did a recording at the Albert Hall, on Mozart and Beethoven, with a choir and full orchestra, and Gary came to that,' says Holland. 'I think he couldn't believe that his career had brought him to a stage where he was part of a live show with an orchestra. Dominic and I felt that, too – it's mad.'
Holland tells me that about half the listenership of the twice-weekly podcast, which is now being developed for television, is under 35. Part of its appeal, he thinks, is that it avoids the finger-wagging approach to history now de rigueur in mus­eums and galleries. 'Quite a lot of public history is moralistic in a way that I think bleeds the interest out of the subject. Both Dominic and I feel quite strongly that history doesn't exist to teach us moral lessons, and we look for the strong vein of ­comedy in history, though it's often unbelievably dark.'
The podcast also 'fills a Radio 4-shaped hole', he says. 'I think Radio 4 has retreated from narrative history and so now people don't realise that even topics as famous as Nelson or Henry V are inherently dramatic and stirring and complex, and we can show that.' Holland used to make history programmes for Radio 4, but always felt hamstrung by guidelines on tone and style. 'There was no opportunity for spontaneity at all. Whereas [with the podcast] we can surprise the listener – do a very sombre story, and then, next week: what would it be like if Stanley Baldwin and the empress Theodora were on Love Island?'
Holland attracts attention by speaking his mind. In 2019, he denounced Jeremy Corbyn for consorting with anti-Semites, and at the beginning of this year, he was deluged with bile on X (formerly Twitter), after he reiterated something he had posted about the grooming-gangs scandal in 2015: 'The true nightmare of Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.'
Today, he clarifies that he thinks 'it's true that when people push through policies that may seem morally grotesque, generally lurking behind it there's a conviction that these policies are morally justified – though, to emphasise, that doesn't mean I think they are morally justified'. Behind the drive to cover up crimes committed by Muslims 'is the shadow of the history of Western pogroms against religious minorities. That's the great moral anxiety that has shadowed Europe since the end of the war, and the grotesque paradox of that is that it then results in closing eyes to mass rape.'
Holland wrote his original tweet at a time 'when I was much likelier to be accused of being an Islamo­phobe than a libtard. I did a film about the origins of Islam, which was sceptical about a lot that Muslims believe about Mohammed and the origins of the Koran, and I had months of death threats.' He admits rather wearily that he is 'on Twitter a lot less now' and isn't planning to make more comments on Islam: 'I've done my time and I don't want to really go back to doing that. It's quite nice to write about ancient Rome and not be embroiled in constant accusations of being racist.'
Making his Koran film required Holland to go to Iraq, after undergoing hostile-environment training. 'The final session was basically: what do you do if you get kidnapped by Isis? And essentially [the answer] was: try and kill yourself.' While in Iraq, he says, 'I was an absolute coward the whole time. I was left with such admiration for war correspondents, while also thinking they're absolute lunatics.'
These days, the great thrill in Holland's life comes from playing cricket: he is a stalwart of the Authors XI, along with Sebastian Faulks and William Fiennes. 'I have been in the best form ever recently,' he says. 'Having previously last taken a catch in 2014, I'm now up for fielder of the year. It's because I have a personal trainer now – he's Bulgarian, and although cricket is not a big feature of Bulgarian life, he's researched how best for me to train. If I win, it will be thanks to him.' That, and the suppleness that comes from decades of scaling bookcases.