Author of award-winning historical work Rubicon and best-seller Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, Tom's sobering gift is to be able to remind us that our future lies in our past and that progress, rightly understood, is an adaptation of ancient ideals, rather than the invention of enlightened modernity.
Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster. Together with Dominic Sandbrook, he co-hosts the popular podcast series The Rest is History.
He is the author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019) and Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which in 2004 won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, a plaudit given to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome”.
As well as producing a wide variety of historical works, Tom has also produced adaptations of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC.
He has presented BBC Radio 4’s Making History and has written and presented a number of TV documentaries, on subjects ranging from ISIS to dinosaurs. Tom presents the podcast The Rest is History with fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook, where they interrogate the past, and attempt to de-tangle the present.