‘Oh dear’: The Rest Is History’s hosts on how Englishmen express deep feelings

Tom Holland (left), 55, and Dominic Sandbrook, 49, are the British historians and brainy friends behind the unlikely global smash-hit podcast The Rest Is History.

Tom: We met in our publisher’s office for a charity quiz in 2005. I’d signed with the publisher earlier and then Dominic got signed. So I felt like the dog in the house and a new dog had been introduced. There was a bit of hackles being up and sniffing each other’s bottoms, as it were. But we sat next to each other and got on tremendously.

We share a kind of inner nerd that we were nervous to reveal even to our wives. Neither of them would have any interest in watching the director’s cut of The Lord of the Rings, which lasts for more than 11 hours. So we secretly agreed that watching it together would be our tryst. We adored every minute.

My brother [historian James Holland] was doing a podcast on World War II and in 2020, the producers wanted to try another history one. Dominic was the first person I thought of doing it with. Every time I ran into him, our friendship just hummed back into life immediately. And because his field is modern history, that set the parameters of the podcast: I’d do the ancient history and he the modern.

“That’s the essence of friendship: gauging emotions very precisely.”

Tom Holland

In December 2021, I suddenly had this terrible cancer diagnosis: they thought it was likely it had spread through my bowel and into my lymph nodes. I told Dominic. If we had been in an American drama, we’d have been bursting into tears. But as Englishmen of a particular class and age, the idea of having an emotional outburst is appalling. Dominic’s reaction was, “Oh, dear, that’s bad.” And then he sent a text saying, “Hope all’s ok.” I knew that he was ­expressing depths of feeling that perhaps ­another person would express in writing long emails. But it turned out everything was fine; the diagnosis was vastly overinflated.

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We know each other so well that if one of us is facing something grim, we know exactly what to say in a way that will not embarrass the other. That’s the essence of friendship: gauging emotions very precisely.

Occasionally, Dominic’s grumpiness annoys me. There are times where I think something is a brilliant idea and I feel like a frustrated Gandalf faced with a Bilbo who’s refusing to leave the Shire to go on an adventure. Rare is the week where I’m not having some dream in which Dominic is saying no to my plans, such as: “We’ve got a time machine to the Roman Empire!” “No!” he’d say.

I describe Dominic as a John Bull character [a stout, frock-coated, country-dwelling satirical figure created in the 1700s] and Dominic alludes to me being a metropolitan, ragù-eating fop, while he’s off hewing oak in an English field. I think he slightly overdoes the idea that he’s the voice of the people. I write about the Colosseum and Pompeii, he writes about [1970s British PM] James Callaghan and income-tax policy. I think he should give me more respect.

Dominic: It was obvious from the beginning that Tom’s intellectually confident. I’m not over-crippled by intellectual humility myself, so it was great to meet somebody who’s confident and relaxed in their knowledge. Tom doesn’t take himself too seriously, so that meant we were kindred spirits.

“We’re former boarding school boys, so we’ve learnt to repress all traces of human feeling.”

Dominic Sandbrook

About six months into the pandemic, Tom rang and said he’d been thinking about this podcast. I immediately said yes. I thought it would be like an evening a week – if that. If you’d said then that we’d spend so much time talking to each other, and indeed coming to Australia [Melbourne on November 18; Sydney on November 23], it would have been a slightly more terrifying prospect.

People ask, “Oh, is it like a marriage?” It’s actually more like a marriage than you’d think. You have to tolerate each other’s quirks and recognise when the other is tired or grumpy. But we’ve done more than 400 episodes and a reasonable job of not falling out. We’re former boarding-school boys, so we’ve learnt to repress all traces of human feeling. If my family had been run over by a bulldozer and we had a recording at 10am, I like to think I’d do it, and then say, “By the way, I’ve got a bit of an issue; we might have to postpone next week’s recording.”

In any relationship, there’s always a danger you end up playing your designated part. He’s Mr Enthusiastic: loves people, gregarious, mad ideas. I’m grumpy and gruff. I often think these are not who we really are, but then I look at our WhatsApp conversations, and my ­contributions are “No, I’d rather die than do that” or “Tell him to go away”.

I’d say Tom’s stuff is more esoteric than mine. I can imagine Tom as a 19th-century vicar earnestly discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution; that would be death to me. I’d rather study my bank statements. My job with Tom is not just to rein him in, but also to get him to remember the audience. He’s the man in a hot air balloon ­always trying to take off, and I’m the bloke pulling down on the ropes to keep it grounded.

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We’ve never been rivals because we work on different periods of history, but we do tease each other. When we did a literary festival in Devon, a critic had just reviewed my book and kindly compared me to [the ancient Greek historian] Thucydides. I said to Tom, “Have you seen The Times?” He said, “I have. It’s awful. What a terrible day to be meeting you and to be here.” On holiday years ago, I sent him a photo of a Portuguese bookshop where a table was piled high with his books and said, “This has really ruined my holiday.”

If there’s any friction – or maybe more a ­raising of eyebrows – it’s because Tom will ­massively stuff his diary with things. He’s also technically impractical. The producer has gone to his house just to unmute him or plug his headphones into the right socket. With anybody else you might become impatient, but I merely have to go on Zoom and see him enthusiastically grinning and any accumulated exasperation melts away. It’s impossible to be cross with him.