It was the screenwriter William Goldman who coined the phrase “nobody knows anything” about Hollywood. By that he meant that nobody in the film industry, not directors, actors, publicists or executives, knows definitively what will make a box office success.
Nobody in the podcasting business either, least of all presenters Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, envisaged The Rest is History becoming one of the most popular English-language podcasts in the world.
What started as a lockdown project for the pair in 2020 had within two years become the most popular podcast on Apple and now has tens of millions of listeners worldwide.
I am one of them. I read countless history books before I started writing them. I find the past a lot more interesting than the present because the stakes seemed so much higher. People’s lives were nasty, brutish and short, to quote Thomas Hobbes. Wars, famines, pestilence, plagues and the capricious demands of rulers makes the past eternally fascinating. The Rest is History quickly became the soundtrack to my free time.
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I first met the two presenters on May 17th, 2023. I remember the date because it was 49th anniversary of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, which I was covering for The Irish Times. I got a text from fellow history buff Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews – would I like to meet them? Would I what?
During lunch they mentioned that they would like to have me on the show to speak about my book, Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP. I thought they were just being polite, but they were serious.
The hosts invited me to record two episodes, one on the shooting incorporating the build-up to the Civil War and a second on the war itself and, in particular, the death of Michael Collins.
So on one of those beautiful days this May we set up to record in a room on the top floor of the Four Courts. The venue was chosen as it was there that the Civil War effectively began on June 28th, 1922, when the Free State army shelled the anti-Treaty garrison which had been holed up inside the building since the previous April.
Holland and Sandbrook are serious historians. Holland is a classical scholar. His book, Dominion, published in 2019, about how Christianity has influenced the western world, is one of my favourite books. His translation of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars was a top-10 bestseller in Britain.
[ The Rest is History: Scholarship with a light touchOpens in new window ]
Sandbrook is a prolific historian of the modern period and has written many books on Britain and the United States which combine great storytelling and scholarship.
They have serious credentials, but they don’t take themselves seriously. This, I believe, is why their reach extends far beyond people who consider themseves “interested in history”.
Sandbrook is married to a Cork woman, Catherine Morley, who is a professor of English in the University of Leicester; Holland is an avid Joycean. After we recorded our episodes, I took him across the river Liffey to see the lamentable state of 15 Usher’s Island, the house where Joyce’s short story The Dead is set.
[ House Private – Frank McNally on the apparent occupation of 15 Usher’s IslandOpens in new window ]
Their interest in Irish history is genuine and important, given how much the past relationships between Britain and Ireland informs the present day.
The quality of their output is matched by the quantity – almost 600 episodes and counting. They do all their own research, often reading two to three books on a particular topic a week. They are ably assisted by their team, with producer Theo Young-Smith and assistant producer Tabby Syrett and others keeping the show on the road and the social media beast fed.
They are also great fun to be around. They love what they are doing. Fortunately, so do millions of listeners around the world.
Most of history is the stories we tell each other about the past. We retain the same hunger for stories as our ancestors who sat around firesides memorising tales of their ancestors for future generations. Only the means of communication has changed.
The story of how Reggie Dunne and Joe O’Sullivan, two British-born veterans of the first World War turned Irish nationalists, assassinated the former head of the British army, an Irish-born British imperialist, on the streets of London is an extraordinary one. I should know – I spent a year and a half writing a book about it.
The fact that one of the assassins, O’Sullivan, had a wooden leg is a detail a fiction editor would have dismissed as implausible.
The presenters of The Rest is History are masterful storytellers. They have an eye for the telling detail that elevates the narrative. When Henry Wilson was a young officer in Burma he was slashed across the face in a fight, crushing his right eye socket. He was never the most handsome man to start with. When a letter was sent to the “ugliest man in the British army” care of a Belfast barracks and its intended destination was him, Wilson delighted in the anecdote for the rest of his life.
[ ‘A lot of history is a very, very dark comedy in which people behave quite badly’Opens in new window ]
Of course, Tom Holland picked up on that fact at the beginning of the podcast. I thought I knew my own book, but I was startled when he mentioned that Joe O’Sullivan and David Beckham had something in common. They both had a girlfriend called “Posh”.
I did recall, as he did, that O’Sullivan smuggled .303 ammunition in his wooden leg when he went to Ireland during the War of Independence – another implausible fact.
The two Rest Is History episodes I appeared in followed four that featured Professor Paul Rouse, who has been an inspired choice to bring listeners through the complications of the War of Independence.
The Rest is History is available on all podcast platforms. Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP by Ronan McGreevy is published by Faber
