Few historians can claim household-name status. Fewer still can boast of podcast audiences rivalling chart-topping musicians. However, typing “The rest is…” into Spotify now summons a miniature empire of spin-offs, politics, money, and film, all descendants of the original The Rest Is History, which Dominic Sandbrook co-presents with Tom Holland.
However, before diving into the podcast itself, we began with the question at the heart of the show’s success: what does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to study history?
“I’m of a generation,” he says, “where most people did humanities subjects at A Level and then went on to do humanities degrees. They were the high-status subjects, highly prestigious and very desirable. I think part of that was because, in the pre-internet world, university was your gateway to these things.”
He remembers his undergraduate years at Balliol vividly: “If you were interested in English or history, by going to university to do it, especially at a university like Oxford, you would feel that the sort of great doors were opening, and you were being ushered into this exciting new world where you could read up on things that interested you. It would be hard to access that world if you weren’t at university.”
Now, he admits, those gates have widened. “I think one of the things that’s happened now that contributes to the decline of humanities subjects is that people question, rightly or wrongly, whether they need to go to university if they’re still interested in those things. You can listen to podcasts, you can watch YouTube videos, you can do all these things without necessarily having to commit yourself to formal study.” Despite dismay at the decline of humanities study in recent decades, Sandbrook has identified a way to turn this cultural shift into an opportunity. He admits, “The weird thing is, in some ways, that’s probably good for me, because it means people can listen to our podcast.”
The numbers tell the story of a public that can fall in love with learning, as The Rest Is History now yields over 11 million monthly downloads since its launch in 2020. Yet Sandbrooke is cautious not to oversell what the medium can do. “I’m not so vain as to think it’s equivalent to studying it properly,” he continues. “I just think in a world that’s very digital and much more visual than it used to be, the old humanities subjects are struggling for airtime.” Still, he sees the enthusiasm from younger listeners as proof that curiosity about the past is far from fading. “I hope,” Sandbrook says, “that we’ve restored some of that appeal. We were astonished by how many of our listeners are under 35, teens, twenties, and early thirties. It’s heartening, because it shows there’s still a massive appetite for history, and that people are invested in the study of the past, of what it means to be human.”
Part of that connection comes from the comedic narrative style of the show, which Sandbrook describes using the same plain enthusiasm that has made the podcast so accessible for regular listeners. “We tell history as a story, as a narrative. We’re always thinking, how do we bring people in? Our producers are great at saying, ‘Think about the ordinary listener who’s listening for the first time.’”
“We actually think it’s fun,” he insists. “I’m not always convinced that every academic specialist thinks of it that way. They sometimes think of it as worthy, which we tend not to do.”
Putting the humour into history is something Sandbrook shares with his younger audience as well in his bestselling Adventures in Time. “Children,” he says, “have an inexhaustible appetite for good stories.” His recent titles transform great historical moments, from Alfred and the Vikings to Dunkirk, into vivid, fast-paced adventures. When I ask how writing for young readers compares to his adult audience, Sandbrook stands up for his child readers and refuses the assumption that writing for children means diluting the material. “You don’t have to dumb it down, necessarily, but basically, treating the stories of history as being good as the greatest stories of literature or pop culture. So I thought, why not write a history book for children? There’s a straight narrative.”
He recalls a striking comment from an editor: “I’ve edited many books in the Second World War, but I’ve never, ever seen one before where I knew that the reader wouldn’t know who’s going to win.” Sandbrook explains how the joy of writing for children is refreshingly pure, from seeing children’s historically themed Halloween costumes on social media to the passion for historical books at World Book Day. “Writing for children is much more satisfying because an adult generally writes to you when they spot a mistake or they want to take issue with something, whereas the child will write to you and just tell you which bit they loved.”
While the show thrives on entertainment and humour, underneath the wit lies a principled commitment to the past as it was lived, not as modern readers might want it to be. “For me, history always comes first, and I don’t believe in using history. I mean, there are two ways that people use history when they write, I think: either as a window looking out at something else, or as a mirror, to look back at yourself and your own society, and using it as a mirror has always struck me as a very boring thing to do.”
He elaborates carefully, conscious of how charged this terrain can be in academia, “I don’t want to hear about a writer’s prejudices or the concerns of his own time, particularly. I know those are inescapable to some degree, but as much as possible, I want to understand the past through the past’s own eyes, and that’s definitely what I try to do.”
“If somebody said, ‘Oh, you’re a politically biased writer,’ I would be gutted, because I definitely don’t see myself that way.” For Sandbrook, history may be about the fun and the facts, but the pull of the story itself is what matters most, not the spectacles that the present day might try to slip onto it.
One detail that frequently catches listeners off guard is the depth to which Sandbrook and Holland immerse themselves in the material, undertaking all their own research to craft narratives that unfold across multiple episodes. His weekly research routine, he jokes, would be familiar to any Oxford undergraduate, laughing about “fifty-two essay crises a year”, finding the podcast not so different to the research he did as a history student. “I loved doing my degree, I loved the fact that having written my essay, the tutor would say |next week we’re doing X, here’s the reading list, off you go.” And I genuinely like going to the library to get the books out, because I’d be like, ‘I can’t wait to find out about this. I’m looking forward to it.’”
“I’m telling the story in my way, and getting somebody else to do that for me would never work. The result is that I think the show feels fresher and more authentic because we’ve genuinely done our own reading.”
Curious about whether the podcast’s trademark camaraderie ever masks classic academic dispute, I ask about the trickiest kinds of historical mysteries: the ones that can only end with “we’ll never know.” He shakes his head. “Not so much the controversial ones where nobody knows what happened, but sometimes we definitely disagree about bad characters, because we generally try to follow the most recent scholarship on something, and we generally tend to agree.”
Narrative confidence, however, does not shield him from the unpredictability of the present. Of The Rest is History – Rest is politics 2024 US election crossover, where he alone guessed the outcome correctly, he remains matter-of-fact. “It was 50-50 in the polls. So it wasn’t exactly like it was going to take great insight to pull that one off. I think some of the people on that panel were thinking with their hearts rather than their heads. And I just thought, I didn’t want him to win, I was gutted that he won, but I didn’t think Kamala Harris would, you know, inspire as much enthusiasm as my fellow panellists did.”
Discussing recent events in politics can be a reminder of how challenging it is to write about the recent past. Sandbrook’s speciality as an academic historian lies in the late 20th century, with books such as Never Had It So Good on British history in the 1950s-1960s and more recently White Heat, which takes readers through the 1970s. As the decades inch closer to recent memory, he describes how “It’s much harder to stand back and be reflective about it. You don’t quite know how the story will play out in the end. You’re very invested in it, personally, in a sort of partisan way, often. I think it’s hard sometimes to see the wood for the trees. The closer you get to the periods where you were kind of politically mature, where you could vote, for example, it becomes very hard to divorce.” He reflects on this quietly for a moment before adding, “I don’t think historians can ever be objective, but I think any claim to neutrality would be… well, it becomes much harder.”
Before we part, Sandbrook returns to a note of reflection that takes us back to the beginning of our conversation about why we study the past. “It’s very easy in an academic context, especially at a very high-powered university like Oxford, for the study of one of the humanities to become a bit desiccated and to become very dry, and sort of the scholarliness of it to almost drive out enthusiasm. Remembering why you first fell in love with the subject, usually when you were a schoolchild, is really, really important. Keeping that sort of innocent enthusiasm for it.” For someone who has spent decades convincing the public that history is neither dry nor distant, it is a fitting final note.
The rest, as they say, is history.
