The Rest Is History
Take a deep dive into History’s biggest moments with Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook. Explore the stories of History’s most brutal rulers, deadly battles, and world-changing events. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Nazi conquest of Europe, and Hitler’s evil master plan for world domination, to the French Revolution, the sinking of the Titanic, or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, Tom and Dominic
Want the full transcripts? Read any episode of The Rest Is History word for word on Podmenti. Podmenti →Most mentioned books
- 1 BritsPeter Taylor · 1× across 1 episode
- 2 For Whom the Bell TollsErnest Hemingway · 1× across 1 episode
- 3 Masters of Rome seriesColleen McCulloch · 1× across 1 episode MO
- 4 Say NothingPatrick Radden Keefe · 1× across 1 episode
- 5 Watching the DoorKevin Myers · 1× across 1 episode
“So to quote Cecil Woodham Smith. Um who's Wonderful book on the uh The Charge of the Light Brigade I read when I was very young”
“Saul David in his tremendous biography of Cardigan, which has the brilliant title of The Homicidal Earl”
“his experience of these battles and wars are what is going to inform his portrayal of Napoleon's invasion in war and peace”
“Orlando Feige's um in his book on the Crimean War describes him a as a man dressed in a uniform decorated with gold braid”
“There's an interesting book about this by Stephanie Barchevsky. called heroic failure in the British”
“Dominic, you're a big fan of Flashman, aren't you? The Flashman novels”
“author of the the best military account of The Crimean War. Um so he is entirely to be trusted”
“So Simon Hall in his book on nineteen fifty six quotes a building worker who was driving through rural Western Hungary”
“Brian Cartledge and his massive history of Hungary is massive history of Hungary is called the Will to Survive”
“He wrote a brilliant book, all of which is online, called Hungarian tragedy”
“Sir Brian Cartledge, who is the British ambassador to Hungary and has written this huge sort of definitive English language history of Hungary. set of Rakushi”
“And the tactic, which is so common across Eastern Europe, and Appenbaum describes it brilliantly in her book, Iron Curtain, is you pretend to be moderate”
“And say, for example, in Simon Hall's book about nineteen fifty six, he quotes a story In a communist party journal”
“He was incredibly heroic in the First World War. He was wounded at the Battle of the Somme, and he famously lay for twelve hours in a shell hole reading Iskylus in the original Greek”
“in the first half we said how he'd read My Early Life by Churchill”
“He actually is a massive reader and he loved Churchill's book. My early life”
“And he was writing in The Birth of Britain, which was the first volume of of his mighty history of the English speaking. People's”
“And he was writing in The Birth of Britain, which was the first volume of of his mighty history of the English speaking. People's”
“And then William Caxton, who published the Mort Dartha. in fourteen eighty five”
“it is this obscure and little regarded text, the Historia Britonum, the history of the Britons, which was written in eight twenty nine in Quinn. In North Wales. purportedly by this Welsh monk called Nenius”
“It is not unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the Kings of Britain”
“Jesse Weston, who wrote a book f called From Ritual to Romance”
“Nicholas Hyam, in his recent book, King Arthur, The Making of the Legend”
“And he wrote the Oxford history of Roman Britain”
“Ken Dark, who's writing about the dark ages. He would say he's writing about early medieval Prison Dominic. Ken early medieval Britain. And he's he's published uh Kings and Tirants it's called”
“So that's a thrillingly dramatic moment in the history of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth”
“by the time Mallory comes to write the Mort Darthur and we've been saying basically the myth of Arthur that people have in their heads now. essentially comes from Mallory”
“And there's a brilliant book on this, on just how historical Merlin was believed to have been in the Middle Ages by”
“And this is the Historia Britonum, the history of the Britons. And it includes Fortgegun welcoming Hengiston Horser”
“the ecclesiastical history of the English people, the first great work of history. in English”
“And this is a text called the De Exidio Britanniae. The ruin of Britain”
“written by a cleric called Geoffrey of Monmouth, and this is the history. of the kings of Britain”
“no literary description of a tournament would be complete without its word picture of the watching ladies ... comes from A classic book. that he wrote on an ideal”
“And the classic example of this in Courtly Romance is in Mallory's Mort Dartha”
“much more than Lancelot inspires Gawain and the Green Knight, the most famous medieval romance to feature Gawain”
“In T H White's Once a Future King. Most of it. is an updating into twentieth century prose of Mallory”
“So that comes at the end of the Mort Dartha, the great prose epic that was written by Sir Thomas Mallory during the Wars of the Roses”
“I'll tell you one that I had, it was by Antonia Fraser. It was by the f it was the first book I think that she ever wrote”
“Oh, I read the Roger Larcel and Green one. Which had kinda wonderful woodcuts”
“It's originally mentioned in collection of annals, so details of of what happens, you know, year on, year out. And these these are called the Annales Cambriae, the Annals of Wales”
“And this is a twelfth century cleric called Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey of Monmouth. Right. The The book. that kind of lights the touch paper. of Arthur Mania. And it's a a history of the kings of Britain”
“and All of this is laid out in the landmark study of the life and times of Sir Thomas Mallory. title of the book and it's by PJ C Field”
“A great historian Colin Jones wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Fall of Cobespier, based on all these reports reconstructing almost minute by minute the events of those two days”
“The author we've talked about a lot, R R Palmer, in his book Twelve Who Ruled, is very good on the optics of this”
“And there's a brilliant book on this by a guy called Dan Edelstein. The terror of natural right”
“So R. R. Palmer, who we've been quoting quite a lot, his brilliant book on the the Committee of Public Safety”
“And in his History of the Revolution, the American historian Jeremy Popkins says, the great irony of this is a republic that is devoted to the rights of man”
“as R. R. Palmer says in his great book 12 Who Ruled, the thing about this is basically it's kind of a recipe for permanent terror because Robespierre is saying”
“to quote Deborah Cadbury, who's written a a a comprehensive and I have to say very harrowing biography of Louis Charles called The Lost King of France”
“so it's his principal source for Tale of Two Cities, which is, I mean, amazingly, the best-selling novel in English”
“Timothy Tackett in his book on the terror, which we've been quoting a lot in this series, he he quotes one of Robespierre's colleagues in 1793”
“reading about them kind of remind me of 19th century novels that always feature these kind of things, Madame Beovary or something like that”
“Peter McPhee in his biography of Rospierre, brilliant biography, writes that although born into a long line of lawyers and officials”
“So Ruth Skurr, who wrote a another biography of Robespierre, Fatal Purity, which is wonderfully well written”
“There's a brilliant new biography came out, I think this year or maybe late last year by the historian Keith Michael Baker, the kind of new definitive life of Mara”
“So in his book on the French Revolution, Peter McPhee cites a club in Granville in Normandy and this club issued a”
“So anyway, at this moment, March, April 1793, the historian Timothy Tackett says this is the major turning point in the coming of the terror”
“So in Simon Sharma's book, Citizens, he quotes one example. Let Marat's head fall and the Republic is saved”
“coach for Paris and she's got her copy of Plutar with her. You know, you can imagine her earnestly reading about Plutus, yes”
“That was the great Victorian hero Sir Harry Flashman, remembering his first meeting with the Emperor Theodrus II in his memoir Flashman on the March”
“book The Barefoot Emperor, from Liverpool to Woolwich, Chatham to Bombay”
“every writer who's written about this says Rassam is fantastic, good judgment, sensible, calm, level-headed, all of this. Rassam arrives on the Red Sea coast at Massawa in July 1864 with two blokes, a Dr. Gord Henry Blanc and Lieutenant Predo of the Bombay Staff Corps. They've come as his assistants. Both with suff suspiciously French names. Well, here's the thing. There are some writers who say the British sent Rassam, Blanc, and Prideau deliberately because if everything went wrong a”
“That was from Rubicon by our very own Tom Holland, describing an ominous moment in the descent of the Roman Republic into its first civil war”
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