The Rest is History a compelling romp of historical fact and discovery

History podcasts are often hosted by monotone nerds regurgitating large swathes of Wikipedia from their bedrooms. Not this one.

A Eunuch's Dream, 1874, by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ. The Cleveland Museum of Art

During the 10th century, at a time of deep religious foment, Europe’s eunuch trade was booming. Across the eastern flank of Christendom Germanic warriors fighting the wars of Saxon emperors captured thousands of young boys from the Slavic lands, transporting them to the merchant cities of Verdun and Venice, where Jewish surgeons castrated them, removing their testicles and sometimes the penis.

Shorn of their manhood, they were ferried across the Pyrenees, down the Iberian Peninsula and on to the Islamic emirates of the south, where they were duly sold into the courts of the Ottoman Empire. It was a hideous but lucrative trade. Some eunuchs achieved high station, becoming trusted even powerful advisers in the Sultan’s Harem. Others were not so lucky, condemned to a life of pain and ignominy.

It’s a grim and altogether sordid history, best approached with crossed-legs and a strong stomach. But it’s the kind of subject that makes Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s podcast, The Rest is History, such a compelling romp of historical fact and discovery.

Since its launch in late 2020, the podcast has racked up millions of downloads and produced more than 100 40-minute episodes, each delivered in a laid back, charismatic and humorous style. A classicist, Holland is known for his best-selling histories of late antiquity, including Rubicon, In the Shadow of the Sword and, more recently, his brilliant book, Dominion. Sandbrook is a modern historian, who has written widely on politics and culture in post-war Britain.

THE REST IS HISTORY PODCAST JACKET

Coming at their subjects from opposite ends of the historical spectrum, the presenters complement and counterbalance each other well: Holland as the high-voltage antiquarian and Sandbrook as the grave modernist, anchoring debate and keeping time.

Brimming with anecdote and aperçu, the podcast takes its cue from BBC’s In Our Time and shares traits with the ABC’s The History Listen. Its subjects are diverse, quirky and often contentious. One week it’s Sparta, the Philosophes and the Norse Sagas; the next it’s James Bond, The Beatles and history’s top 10 mistresses.

Occasionally guest historians are invited on to speak about specialist subjects, but it’s the acerbic wit and punditry of Holland and Sandbrook that gives The Rest is History its X factor.

As they flash from one epoch to another, they broach history’s biggest questions. Who would’ve been the best Tweeter in the classical world? The Industrial Revolution: why the Brits, not the Dutch? Who had a Golden Age and who did it best? Periclean Athens, Rome in 150 AD, the Spain of Cervantes. The list of claimants is long. But the conundrum, the duo suggest, is best captured in Harry Lime’s quotation from The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michaelangelo, da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

As other reviews have noted, this is a show with good arguments. Disputes are encouraged, thrashed out and very often lead to the podcast’s best moments. In a two-part episode on Watergate, for instance, Sandbrook reminds us of Hunter S Thompson’s brutal obituary of America’s 37th president: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals … He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. He was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

The 17th century gets a lot of mileage because it provides such a curious mirror of our own turbulent times, as plague, pestilence and statue smashing make a spectacular 21st century comeback. The flourishing of print culture, politics and the wars of religion also offer other similarities and connections.

The pressure to make history relevant and somehow applicable to contemporary affairs has meant the past has been badly served by the podcast industry. Recent years have seen a deluge of history podcasts, often hosted by monotone nerds regurgitating large swathes of Wikipedia from their bedrooms. But Sandbrook and Holland show us the possibilities of the medium. They suggest that understanding the past, reading about it and debating it should never be the preserve of po-faced academics or subject specialists. More than a year after its debut, it’s likely The Rest is History will go down as a podcasting classic.

Listen to The Rest is History on your favourite podcast app.