The hosts of the hugely successful The Rest Is History podcast discuss their passion for history, their podcasting experiences, and their favourite episodes
After being approached by Goalhanger Podcasts to start a history podcast during the COVID- 19 lockdown, renowned historian Tom Holland decided to recruit his good friend and fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook to the project. Since their first episode was made available at the end of 2020, The Rest Is History podcast has gone from strength to strength, garnering a huge fan base across the world. Now, the hosts have released a book exemplifying the best of the podcast. We sat down to chat with the pair about their podcasting success and their love of history.
How did the podcast first come about?
TH: I went to meet [Tony Pastor at Goalhanger] and we had a long discussion about what exactly the format should be. My background is in ancient history, so should it be focused on ancient history, or should we aim for something a little bit more ambitious and go for modern history? The moment everyone agreed that we should do that, it seemed to me that Dominic was the obvious person to turn to. He’s a brilliant historian, not just of modern Britain but of modern America, and also he’s been writing reviews for The Sunday Times for yonks, so he has incredibly detailed knowledge of a whole range of history.
DS: I think it really helped that neither of us listened to podcasts. We’ve both done lots of radio and TV, so we’ve done public-facing things, but we hadn’t done anything like this. First of all it was a great liberation to be able to go and do whatever we wanted and not to worry about a commissioner or a controller. We could say what we liked and do whatever subjects we wanted, but also with the format there was nothing to set our course by. The great thing about doing the podcast is that we will do a given topic and sometimes one of us will take the lead, sometimes we might do it equally. Sometimes we might have a guest, and often I r
