The Rest Is History

Right. So I wrote about this in Persian Fire.

I wrote about this in Persian Fire.

This is a brilliant opportunity for you to advertise your book of Persian Fire. Thank you.

Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the West lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would have ever been such an entity as the West at all. So says the blurb for a little-known history book called Persian Fire by Tom Holland.

Tom your book Persian Fire is called the subtitle is what is it the first world war and the first world empire and the battle for the west and the battle for the west.

and I when I when I rate potion fire which I'm shamelessly going to plug no you should my book on this it is the popular history on this but it's kind of you know you have to write a blurb and I rate Persian Fire in the backdrop to the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war

the blurb that I wrote for Persian Fire in the fifth century BC a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states the superpower was Persia

And that, Tom Holland, is the climactic scene of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's masterwork, one of the books that he believed would be remembered long after Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were forgotten. Sir Nigel, the book that fired your love of history all those decades ago.

So Tom Holland, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel. Beautifully written as usual. Sir Nigel, both beautifully written and I think it's fair to say remarkably read.

Arthur Conan Doyle always thought they were better than the Sherlock Holmes books, and he was gutted, wasn't he, that people paid so much attention to Holmes and not enough to Nigel.

Well, actually Sir Nigel, Conan Doyle's novel, opens with a brilliant account of the Black Death coming.

So that's Tom Holland. It was a reading from Sir Nigel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Tom, you talked last time about how much you loved that book, Sir Nigel, when you were growing up.

So Tom Holland, that beautiful passage of prose, the introduction of the Red Ferret in the book Sir Nigel, which you recommended to me, you regard that as one of the great landmarks in Western literature, don't you? I'd completely forgotten the Red Ferret, and I don't know how I could have done... it's by Arthur Conan Doyle.

The White Company. White Company, Sun Nigel.

He believed that people had in the attic, in the cupboard, all kinds of unacknowledged fears and anxieties and desires, including sexual desires... Two years later, when he published The Interpretation of Dreams, Oedipus's story featured very prominently in it, didn't it, Tom?

He believed that people had in the attic, in the cupboard, all kinds of unacknowledged fears... Two years later, when he published The Interpretation of Dreams, Oedipus's story featured very prominently in it.

He did it in 1897, and he published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Oedipus's story was a key part of that work.

Freud adored Blackpool so much that memories of paddling in the waters there were included in his book on The Interpretation of Dreams.

And then there's a book by Freud that was published in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, the idea that buried deep down in this kind of very primal and unfathomable way are anxieties and ghosts and terrible urges that we try to repress.

The seminal gothic novel by Arthur Conan Doyle ... the hound of the baskervilles.

The seminal gothic novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.

the sign of four, the hour of the Baskervilles, the study in Scarlet are as nothing.

how did the Baskervilles is 1901?

the Lord of the Rings, the sequel to it.

the great villain... Sauron... in the Lord of the Rings is the kind of Satan figure that drives the plot.

Of the journeying far from home with the band of friends... there is more in the Lord of the Rings, the sequel to it.

the Lord of the Rings ... it is no longer a children's book. It's clearly not pitched as a children's book.

the Lord of the Rings turned into, it's no longer a children's book... the best part of 17 years for the Lord of the Rings to be written.

the Lord of the Rings is the great novel on the horrors of the mid20th century.

Tolkien originally began the Lord of the Rings thinking it would be one short book and it turned into three monsters.

Or the ring in The Lord of the Rings is a super weapon, isn't it? And that the prospect of using the ring hangs over the Lord of the Rings.

J.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Hobbit to Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula to Margaret Atwood's dystopian fable The Handmaid's Tale.

So this is Bill Weier Baggins in The Hobbit published in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien.

One of the great beauty, the great charm of the Hobbit, which I think is a perfectly conceived children's book.

So this is Bill Weier Baggins in The Hobbit published in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien.

the great beauty, the great charm of the Hobbit, which I think is a perfectly conceived children's book.

The Hobbit is a perfectly calibrated story that you can read at nine and still enjoy it; it's a children's book that works for adults too.

So we did The Hobbit and In Cold Blood and The Handmaid's Ted and so on and so forth.

A decade later, when he embarked on a fantasy novel called A Game of Thrones, his visit to Hadrian's wall was to prove a particularly vivid influence - a war, as he would later describe it, defending civilisation against unknown threats beyond.

I am, and I'm proud to say that I was an early adopter because I read the early books before the TV show started.

Yeah, I got the first book, devoured it pretty much in a day, and I thought they were really great and the book was brilliant.

I've got to say that it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.

So Game of Thrones, Normal People, The Hunger Games, Hamnet, all manner of exciting stories.

And then also some more modern stuff. So Game of Thrones, Normal People, The Hunger Games, Hamnet, all manner of exciting stories.

The second, Dynasty, that of Augustus, Rome's first emperor and the line of rulers who claimed descent from him.

I've done it twice in two books I've written, Rubicon and Dynasty.

I've done it twice in two books I've written, Rubicon and Dynasty.

this podcast, a wonderful historian whose books The Anarchy, White Moguls, Return of a King, The Last Mogul, anyone interested in Indian or British history I'm sure will have come across and if they haven't then they're very lucky because they've just been issued in a wonderful bumper pack

you tell it brilliantly your four books yankee white moguls return of a king the last mogul the company called tete

We'll be doing Bram Stoker's chilling Dracula.

J.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Hobbit to Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula to Margaret Atwood's dystopian fable The Handmaid's Tale.

Also Dracula, which is published in 1897. The idea of darkness coming to England.

You also have a completely terrifying poem that Byron writes about the experience of the darkness ... they put this poem by Byron and are reworking the it by Pushkin ... and you get Dracula basically kind of being born here.

So that was Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, and he is writing, of course, about the guillotine.

You would think if you had read A Tale of Two Cities and all of the sort of, you used the caricatures of the French Revolution and the French elite, that nobody did anything to help.

Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, one of the most influential books on our perception of history that has ever been written.

She gave him a leather band copy of A Tale of Two Cities.

In her book Fifth Sun, Camilla Townsend is brilliant on this, on the way in which they think the cosmology works. The sun rises and falls and it's actually the constant flow of blood that keeps it going.

Camilla Townsend in her wonderful book, Fifth Sun, which we've had plenty of reason to mention, she says about this that it was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians.

We did that wonderful episode with Camilla Townsend talking about the Aztecs and Mexica, how they saw the world, and how that transforms your understanding of the process of the conquest.

I thought it's a kind of wonderful companion piece to Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun; it shows a slightly bad scholarly habit of assuming motivations without looking at the indigenous viewpoint.

our very first transatlantic guest, our first American guest on the show, we have Camilla Townsend, whose book came out last year, Fifth Sun, A New History of the Aztecs was absolutely the best book that I read last year.

the thing that's brilliant about it is that it gives you a history of the Aztecs through Aztec eyes in so far as that is possible.

Camilla's book is the fifth son, a new history of the Aztecs, honestly one of the most fascinating, eyeopening, moving history books I've read; can't recommend it highly enough.

I noted it down when I read it those Aztecs who lived through the war with the Spaniards and then survived the first great epidemic of European diseases found to their surprise that the sun continued to rise and set and that they still had to face the rest of their lives.

Hallie Rubenhold in her book, The Five, she believes all the women were killed as they slept.

Hallie Rubenhold in her book, The Five, she believes all the women were killed as they slept. Philip Sutton, on the other hand, she went out to solicit to get customers.

Hallie Rubenhold, who's been on the show in the early days, she wrote a book called The Five, didn't she? In 2019, a prize winning book, which was a sort of group biography of the murdered women.

to quote Hallie Rubenhold in whose book The Five, you know, she gives very detailed accounts of the lives of the other victims, all of them expertly sourced, kind of drawing on all kinds of written material. But she says of Mary Jane Kelly, not a single statement made by her about her life prior to her arrival in London has ever been verified.

Hallie Rubenhold in her book, The Five, which is brilliant on the lives of the victims, has a thesis that the victims were all killed as they slept, that they were homeless.

We talked last time about the great Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji.

We talked last time when we were explaining about The Tale of Genji... we sort of talked about what a remarkable book it is to read.

The Tale of Genji, you can recognize it as a novel, but the pillow book is unlike really anything that's been written since.

Genji has been courting this woman for a very long time, a very arduous process. ... we can see why this would add an extra dimension to the rivalry between the two women.

It's a novel called The Tale of Genji. And to give you a sense of the sheer weight of it, in the translation by Royal Tyler, which we'll be quoting from a fair bit today, that book is more than 1,000 pages long.

The Tale of Genji is actually a historical novel. So it's set in the 10th century.

she's famous isn't she for The Tale of Genji which is often described as the first kind of great novel from Asia? That's right, the first novel or the world's first psychological novel you could say.

the first of these episodes was on The Tale of Genji, which is an enormous 1100 page novel written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, Lady Murasaki

She had been written about in the Theogony.

the poem in which it features, which is called the Theogony or the birth of the gods, is itself at the kind of the wellspring...

She had been written about in the Theogony. Hesiod says that she was a sibling of Cerberus...

It is the poem called the Theogony or the birth of the gods, is itself at the kind of the wellspring, not just of Greek poetry, but actually of European poetry.

final reading from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's masterwork, a work compared with which the sign of four, the hour of the Baskervilles, the study in Scarlet are as nothing. So these are the final lines of Tom Holland's favorite book.

So Tom Holland, that beautiful passage of prose, the introduction of the Red Ferret in the book Sir Nigel, which you recommended to me, you regard that as one of the great landmarks in Western literature, don't you? I'd completely forgotten the Red Ferret... Arthur Conan Doyle thought that Sir Nigel and the other in the same series, The White Company, were better than Sherlock Holmes.

I think we talked about this before, the Conan Doyle's novels. The White Company. White Company, Sun Nigel.

Have you read The White Company? I have. I love everyone says, oh, it's dreary, maybe I loved it. I read it as a child. And there's a sequel, Sonight on, which is brilliant.

by the War in the West by my brother, James Holland. By December 1939, British intelligence deduced that of the 22 million tons of iron ore imported in 1938, the equivalent of nine and a half million tons had come from sources now close to it.

And the French kind of go up to it and an excellent description in a book by James Holland, my brother, The War in the West, Germany Ascendant 1939 to 1941.

Just to ask, and this is a point my brother makes in his book.

So that is obviously a massive crisis for the Nazi war effort, because without iron ore, they can't build their planes and guns and all that kind of stuff. The War in the West by my brother, James Holland. By December 1939, British intelligence deduced that of the 22 million tons of iron ore imported in 1938, the equivalent of nine and a half million tons had come from sources now close to it.

I remember in my brother's book, The War in the West, which I've been quoting a lot in this series, he has an account of German girls and their misery at the fact that the only clothes available in the shops are all brown.

In his book, Empire of the Deep, the historian Ben Wilson makes what should be the obvious point, but it hadn't really occurred to me that there is a massive difference between this and previous battles.

In his book, Empire of the Deep, the historian Ben Wilson makes what should be the obvious point, but it hadn't really occurred to me that there is a massive difference between this and previous battles.

This is one from Ben Wilson's book, Empire of the Deep. And he says, for thousands of sailors on both sides, the battle was a glimpse into hell.

I read a book called Empire of the Deep by Ben Wilson all about the Royal Navy.

in his book, The Realness of Things Past, he argues that the gods of Attica were seen as benevolent governors or caring parents.

Greg Anderson, who I've already cited in this series, in his book, The Realness of Things Past.

Greg Anderson wrote a wonderful book about the emergence of Greek democracy, but he also wrote a kind of altogether weirder book called The Realness of Things Past.

Greg Anderson ... wrote a wonderful book about the emergence of Greek democracy. But he then wrote a kind of altogether weirder book called The Realness of Things Past.

I would argue one of the most extraordinary passages of prose you will ever read. It is the beginning of a really, really remarkable and original masterpiece called The Pillow Book...

And what shines through on every page is the wit, the brilliance, the sophistication, the charm, and the individual personality of the author in a way that I don't think I've ever encountered with any other work of medieval literature.

The fun of reading The Pillow Book is that Sei Shonagon is very, she's very playful. You can never entirely trust what she's saying, I think.

In the Penguin Classic translated by Meredith McKinney, she places The Pillow Book in the context of a political crisis at court that was directly threatening Seishonagon's position there.

It sounds a weird parallel, but I thought of P.G. Woodhouse writing Bertie Worcester in the 30s. It's that this world of kind of genial humour has no place really for depressions or wars.

Wonderful. Thank you very much, Tom. So that book is the pillow book, and we'll be talking about that next time.

It's the same with the Pillow book, isn't it?

a lot of people have been saying that the new newsletter is comparable probably only to The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book in terms of elegance of composition, in terms of the wealth of information, the information about medieval Japan, and just the sort of general sense of beauty and poise and sort of beautiful balance to it.

anyone who's read I, Claudius will remember Narcissus and Pallas and people like that, who presumably they're very bright and they're very good.

I, Claudius, you know, as a novel, but even more as a TV drama kind of lies at the head of all these great dynastic epics that we've had on TV over the past decades.

The identity of the man who translated the previous edition of Suetonius' Lives for Penguin Classics, who's none other than Robert Graves. So the author of I,Claudius obviously turned the raw material from the Twelve Caesars into his novels I,Claudius and Claudius the God.

I,Claudius then became a BBC TV series in the 1970s, hugely successful.

People remember the TV show, I, Claudius or read Robert Graves' novels.

the Heineken advert ... I Claudius ... Christopher begins as Nero is he's sent in so many gladiators to death that he can't move his thumb so they bring on a glass and he drinks it and then he's able to start sentencing gladiators to death again