… the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often meaning is only revealed retrospectively. Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light

You think that you can forget the past; you can’t. The past is a living thing, you own it, owe it.”Montrose’s letter to Atticus, Lovecraft Country

The past is never dead. It is not even past.  William Faulkner

Remembering …comes in flashbacks and echoes. Taylor Swift’s Red

The past beats inside me like a second heart. John Banville, The Sea

We watch history, we make history, and then one day, we become it. Kendall Roy, Succession

I have little affection for News Corp commentator Janet Albrechtsen – a right wing culture warrior who cloaks her predictable positions with a patina of legal erudition (she does have a legal background, but a barrister friend who once worked with her described her as less clever than she thought she was). But I recently discovered that she and I actually have one thing in common. We are both big fans of The Rest is History, an excellent podcast created and broadcast by British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. And so, for the first, and probably the last time, I not only enjoyed one of her opinions pieces, but I am actually republishing it here in In That Howling Infinite.

Tom Holland specializes in classical and early medieval history, and Dominic Sandbrook is an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society. I’ve read many of their books. Holland’s Roman trilogy, Rubicon, Dynasty and his recent Pax read like thrillers, and he’s also written on Persian and Islamic history. Sandbrook’s quad of books on Britain are wide-ranging and highly entertaining, covering the social and political history from the fifties though to the the early eighties.

The Rest is History is both highly entertaining and illuminating with this unlikely but erudite dynamic duo presentng wide-ranging and well-researched stories from history’s back pages served up with bad accents and impersonations and humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense – though more often it is Dom taking the piss out of Tom.

Since the first episode on Greatness aired in October 2020 during Britain’s draconian Covid lockdown, there have now been almost four hundred more – about important events and personalities, cities and countries,  political and cultural movements, and wars and revolutions metaphorical and actual. There’s counterfactuals, predictions and projections, culture wars and conspiracy theories. Some multi-episode podcasts are particularly enthralling. The story of Irish independence is one. The rise of British Fascism is another. The two part British Fashion in the Sixties is a hoot. Stand-alone episodes on JRR Tolkien, Rider Haggard and JK Rowling are likewise entertaining whilst others, like the sad story of Lady Jane Grey, “the Nine Day Queen”, are tragic. The Rest is History is a gift that keeps on giving.

Whilst Tom and Dom are certainly small “c” conservatives, I’m glad that they do not go all out partisan for the “anti-woke” brigade – there are lots of jibes at readers of The Guardian. They do, however, have no time for history and culture wars nor identity politics. We have to take our history, the good and the bad, as it comes. Many of the things we learnt at school or in our national narratives have retrospectively proven false or distorted.

When telling their tales, be they long, tall or small, they demonstrate that not all history has to be important so long as it is interesting. It’s the stories that enthrall children when they are first taught history – that is how I became passionate about it and remain so.

In the early sixties, we were introduced to the romantic, exciting, and often sugar-coated basics, and only later on did we learn that the Boer War and the Indian Mutiny for example were not that noble and glorious at all but nasty scraps with atrocities committed on all sides. Recall that corny old chestnut 1066 And All That, which I read as a lad and still dip into now and then for its perspective on what we were taught back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. “Bad kings” were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few “bad things”, and if there were, it’s wasn’t us wot did it. As a nipper, I came across the ‘He Went With …’ books of American author Louse Andrews Kent in which a young lad (always a chap) accompanied famous explorers on their journeying. Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama got a gig, as did landlubbers Champlain and Marco Polo. Ladybird Books introduced starry-eyed youngsters to those intrepid Brits Captains Cook and Scott, Drake and Raleigh. Back then, of course, we were not to know what came next: the European mission civilatrice.

In time, like St Paul, “I put off childish things”, but believe still that history can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics, history snobs and culture warriors. There’s a Canadian writer who tells stories from world history called “Sweary History” or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift.

I don’t regard myself as a “historian” but rather as a longtime and eternal student, and have been thus since. I’ve degrees in history and politics. I’ve been studying history since first form, back in 1960. I’ve been filling in the gaps ever since, learning new things every day from books, journals, television, and media both mainstream and social. Today, I read history books more than any other books and always have a few on the go.  I’ll never made history, not will I make it in the time I have left on this fascinating planet, but I write about history and endeavour to increase other’s interest in and awareness of history and its importance to us all. Just like The Rest is History, indeed.

Albrechtsen’s piece coincides with the pair’s imminent visit to Australia and New Zealand to “perform” The Rest is History live. Doubtlessly, they will give us their narrative on Australian history. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about our British inheritance, the colonial legacy, and our very own history wars. Sandbrook tells her:

“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns  patronizes the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections. People do get bored of these things. History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale. The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”

Says Holland: “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality”.

Sandbrook is asked what on earth  he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia.  “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.

See history posts in In That Howling Infinite: Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s backpages

The Rest is History hosts say stop moralising about the past

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

Last month, this random question began circulating on social media, with women doing the asking. The similarity of the responses made headlines around the world in the same week I was speaking with British historian Tom Holland. Surely Holland would think a lot about the ancient world?

I try out the question over pizza and wine with a group of four men on a sunny spring day on the Mornington Peninsula. One asks if Rome is code for sex. No, fellas, I mean Rome as in Augustus, bloodshed, the Colosseum, concrete, the Julian calendar and all that stuff.

All four men say, one way or another, that they think about ancient Rome most days. Seriously? The closest I come to musing regularly about ancient history is Brad Pitt circa AD2004 as Achilles. Yes, he’s a Greek, not real. Whatever.

Holland and fellow Brit Dominic Sandbrook have become superstars of history. Their podcast, The Rest is History, attracted a cult following after the first episode, released in London during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Its popularity has soared, along with the profiles of its hosts. Today the show attracts more than 10 million downloads a month, half by people under 35.

It’s not hard to see why. The two popular historians bring something different and remarkable to the telling of history. Holland, who hails from Broad Chalke near Salisbury in southern England, taught himself Greek to write a new translation of Herodotus’s The Histories. Sandbrook, from the West Midlands, is a modern historian and author of numerous books on Britain from the 1960s to the ’80s, including Who Dares Wins and a host of history books for children.

Holland immerses us in ancient stories – all magnificently foreign, rousing and grisly. As he explores the lives of Nero and eunuchs, Theodora, the Empress of Byzantium, Thermopylae and Salamis and everything else about ancient Rome or Greece, it’s thrilling.

His latest book, Pax, the third in a series, covers Roman power under emperors such as Vespasian, Titus, Domitian and Hadrian. On the last page, Holland records a scrawl of graffiti on a rock face in the wilds beyond Palestine: “The Romans always win.”

To be honest, his excitement about the subject is so palpable I wasn’t game enough to ask how often he thinks about ancient Rome. It really would have been the equivalent of asking a man how often he thinks about sex.

When I catch up with his colleague Sandbrook a week later, he teases that “the imbalance in how often Tom thinks about those two things is very, very unhealthy”.

Such is the elation in Sandbrook’s voice during his podcasts on Watergate, could it be that he thinks about Richard Nixon as often as Holland thinks about Rome? Sandbrook taught a twice-weekly year-long course on Nixon at Sheffield University. That’s a lot of Nixon. He tells me that by the end of the course many of his students empathised with the awkward, flawed man who struggled with the fact he could never be as cool as the Kennedys. But who is?

The absence of politics in their telling of history is a tonic in this exhaustingly moralising era. Those who want to corral history to suit their politics by expunging bits or rewriting parts will get a fright: neither man will have a bar of this modern obsession to overlay the past with modern filters of sex, gender, race and so on.

During Pride Week in Britain, the pair released a podcast on the intriguing story of Hadrian and his lover Antinous. Holland points out that though the alluring Antinous has become a modern-day gay icon, calling the young Greek gay doesn’t capture the time; it’s like saying Julius Caesar conquered France. The correct word is Gaul.

Similarly, in writing Pax, Holland is trying to see that world through Roman eyes. “I deliber­ately say in my introduction that I’m not going to judge the Romans by our standards,” he tells Inquirer from his home in London.

Though we might regard some of the actions of the Romans as unspeakable crimes, let’s try to understand why they didn’t see them as crimes, he says. This is the study of history.

Sandbrook predicts a younger generation will kick out the po-faced cultural curators of the aching wokeness that has imbued history. Or it will burn itself out.

“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns … patronises the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections,” Sandbrook says. “People do get bored of these things.” History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale.

“The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”

Holland agrees. “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality,” he says.

If society is applying modern filters of sex, gender and race to the past, that tells us something about our own time; it says nothing about that period in history.

“One of the things that has happened since the ’60s with the collapse of the traditional biblical narratives that sustained our cultural and intellectual discourses is that people need new stories. History has come to serve people as a quarry for moral stories, it’s come to replace religious studies,” Holland says.

Speaking from his home in Chipping Norton in West Oxfordshire, Sandbrook says the worst kind of history is “the history that makes you feel smug about yourself … It smacks of smug narcissism about our own virtue.”

“Just as people before us believed lots of things that we now think are demented, the things that we value so highly may seem unreasonable to our successors. What history should give us is a sense of humility.”

In a similar vein, Holland says history has left him with a “nagging sense of nihilism, a sense that perhaps there is no absolute morality”.

“People across the world and throughout time have believed an incredible array of things about how you should behave, what it is to be good, what sexuality morality should be, how you should treat your fellow human beings, all kinds of things, what gender relations should be. There is no absolute right way of structuring your society. If I’d grown up as a Spartan or an Assyrian, would I believe in human rights? I would not.”

That brings us to Dominion, Holland’s 2019 book about how the Christian revolution continues to shape the modern world. Even if churches across the West continue to empty, Christian values continue to define who we are and the battles we choose to fight.

Holland tells Inquirer that at the centre of social movements of the ’60s, from civil and gay rights to the more recent Black Lives Matters, is “Christ’s great promise that the last should be first”.

“The 1960s will come to be seen as a decade as significant for Christendom as the 1520s. We are living through a process of moral and ethical and, indeed, theological change comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And the idea of reformation, the idea of casting off superstition, idols, opening yourself to the spirit. You get that in the 1520s, and you get that in the 1960s.

“The difference in the 1960s is that what is being cast off is essentially what you might call a conservative Christian understanding of how society should function, going to church, experiencing liturgies, Sunday schools, familiarity with the Bible.”

What remains, says Holland, are instincts and muscle memories that derive from 2000 years of Christianity. Why, he asks, did the killing of an innocent man – George Floyd – by the security apparatus of an imperial power have the impact that it did across the world? It seems odd, he says, until you remember that the foundational figure of Christ was an innocent man put to death by the security apparatus of an earlier imperial power.

There is “a kind of Christ-shaped hole in our public culture. And George Floyd kind of filled that gap for that summer of 2020.”

Holland is not a nostalgic Christian who reads history. He is a historian observing the influence of Christianity without making moral judgments. He says large swaths of Western modernity are having arguments within a Christian framework, often without realising it. Should sodomy be condemned, or monogamy be encouraged with same-sex marriage? These are Christian values, and people, by the democratic process in many countries, have settled on the latter.

Holland says the #MeToo movement is an extension of the Christian value that “the human body is not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased”.

“Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men and women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force,” Holland writes in Dominion. He says the same “last shall be first” kind of “hyper-Protestantism push” also has infused the trans movement. With no formal church framework to arbitrate arguments, it has become “a free-for-all” where everyone is understandably trying to do it for themselves.

He adds that often these debates – not just about trans issues – become vitriolic because there is a modern revulsion against the doctrine of original sin – a tremendously democratising idea.

Once you reject that even the greatest saint is a sinner then some people will see themselves as perfect. They will be more prone to casting out those they see as not perfect. Without original sin, there is a peculiar virtue in being last, in being a victim, and there is less room for redemption as people set down their own unyielding boundaries about who is good and who is bad.

Again, Holland makes no judgment about this; he is simply observing that Christianity explains woke­ism. Not to mention our polarised modernity.

Sandbrook, the modern historian, is concerned that the “hysterical polarisation of American politics” is turning the US into a dysfunctional society as the tectonic plates of power are shifting towards a dominant Asia. It is, he says, a return to the older pattern of geopolitical rivalries involving China, India, Turkey, Iran. “These would have seemed very familiar to people 2000 years ago.” And this is happening when the centre ground of politics is disappearing in the US.

‘He says once you treat your domestic political enemies as a genuine threat to the republic, when you say they are not merely wrong, they are treacherous, and we must do everything we can to stop them, then “it’s really difficult to see how you turn back without some major crisis”.

The two historians will be in Australia in late November, performing their Rest is History live show soon after the referendum about changing our Constitution has been decided. That’s right. History sells tickets at the box office, too. So how will these historians answer questions about British colon­ialism?

“Tom is so jittery,” says Sandbrook. “He said to me, ‘Please don’t say anything that will get us cancelled in Australia. Also, don’t tell the journalist that I told you this.’ ”

That Sandbrook wants me to print this tells you that the dynamic between these two men is as vibrant as the content of their podcasts. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense. Though more often it is Sandbrook taking the piss out of Holland.

I ask Sandbrook what on earth he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia. “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.

On a more serious note, the pair will delve into Australian history late next month when they release two episodes on Captain James Cook.

Neither Holland nor Sandbrook knew in 2020 how successful their podcast would become. Sandbrook recounts that Holland wanted the “worst title ever” for their new venture: Podpast. “It was such a terrible title,” he says, laughing. They settled on The Rest is History. And, well, the rest is history.

Though it’s also possible that a lame title would not have stopped these men becoming rock stars of history