Edinburgh International Book Festival: History is the new rock and roll and Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are its Lennon and McCartney – Susan Dalgety

On Thursday morning, I will join the online stampede to buy tickets for historian Tom Holland’s appearance at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, but I don’t hold out much hope of securing them.

History is the new rock and roll, in part because of the phenomenal success of The Rest Is History podcast, which he presents with Dominic Sandbrook. The Lennon and McCartney of history broadcasting started their twice-weekly show on November 2, 2020, with a discussion about “greatness” which featured Nero to Nixon.

Their latest thrilling episode is about J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist in charge of developing America’s first nuclear bomb. They are eclectic in their choice of topic, chatting about everything from history’s greatest dogs to the decline in Christianity in Britain.

Their podcast now attracts six million downloads a month, their Rest Is History club has 20,000 subscribers and, rather surprisingly, more than half their audience is under 35. History really is the new rock and roll.

Holland and Sandbrook’s show is not the only popular history podcast. There is a range of excellent British and American podcasts from Not Just the Tudors, presented by Suzannah Lipscombe, to History Daily which explores a momentous event that happened ‘on this day’. Did you know that Jaws hit US cinemas on 20 June 1975, nearly 50 years ago?

As a former history (and English Literature) student – if a year of university counts – I love them all. There is no hit TV show or Oscar-winning film based on fiction that can match the drama of real life, from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire (Holland’s specialist subject) to the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, on which Sandbrook is an expert.

It’s a well-worn cliché to say that we need to know the past to understand our present, but like most cliches, it’s true. Even a cursory analysis of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed anywhere between 20 and 50 million people, would have helped guide politicians as they grappled with Covid.

And the psychodrama that was Henry VIII’s love life makes our own Royals – including Harry and Meghan – seem entirely rational. History, even the horrid stuff, is a subject worth studying.