The Rest Is History - 290: 2022: A History

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic for the final episode of 2022 in which they discuss the historical importance of this year. What will historians of the future remember about this year? The invasion of Ukraine? The end of the post-Cold War era? *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to the very last Rest Is History of 2022. And Dominic, we are still in Bury Brothers, aren't we? We are. So in the previous episode, we came to Bury Brothers in the heart of London's West End, St James, to record an episode on the history of booze with Henry Jeffreys, which was great and he's now gone off to do whatever one three days ago tom yeah that's the truth we've been camped out here yeah in the cellar days so here we are and dominic at the beginning

of the year we did an episode on 1922 to mark the centenary of it and we said that this was a truly historic year a year when perhaps modernity was born. And so the obvious question is, in 100 years time, when we're still doing this podcast, will we look back and see 2022 as being of a similarly historic order? I mean, I guess the one obvious,

huge historic thing that people will be studying in history books is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Well, if you look back to that 1922 podcast we did i'm trying to think of all the different things we covered because we covered british politics we covered international affairs didn't we culture so it was um the wasteland yeah ulysses and i think that is the thing that makes 1922 specific so actually yeah the the book on 1922 which is it kevin jackson's book i think it

is it largely focuses actually on the on modernism and 1922 as a cultural sort of hinge point and i suppose the problem with that is that the whole thing about modernism is that it's very very obscure and only very few people know that it's going on so if there's an analogous cultural experiment i mean we won't have heard of it we're not at the avant-garde tom i think that's that we're not also i think um i'm sure we talked about this in in that podcast there was a sense that you know the age of proust and joyce and picasso and stravinsky this was the kind of the last age of the great man as artist and that really has kind of faded now hasn't it yes i mean 2022 has been a year of course of talk of cancellation of toppling people from their pedestals like the

last few years so that kind of runs counter to the very great man view of artistic creation that you so you have in 1922 where it's about the genius of t.s elliott or james joyce as you say but i think even at the time there was a sense wasn there, in the early 20s that a lot of social, cultural, political assumptions had fractured in the aftermath of the First World War, and that Britain, Europe, and the world were trying to adjust to a new age. I don't think we quite have that sense, do we? No, not at all. Because the modernists were, you know, these fragments of I shored against my ruin, Elliot, as Elliot puts it, in the wasteland. It's the sense that the civilization has shattered and all you can do really is kind of make collages out of the shattered pieces. But it is still the great man who is doing that, Picasso, Joyce, whoever.

But no one would say that now. I mean, you know, there is no longer anyone who serves as the paradigmatic great novelist, great painter, great composer, or even, you know, kind of great pop star, great rock star. Yeah. Partly because of the multiplication of outlets, I suppose. I'm sure that's it. Because of the fragmentation of culture. And also globalisation, perhaps. Globalisation, yeah.

Agreed. Agreed. and also globalization perhaps yeah agreed agreed but to go back to your what you said at the beginning um when people write about this year in 21 22 they will undoubtedly think of the events of late february when russia launched that invasion of ukraine i think that's there's a sense now we did podcast didn't we in the immediate aftermath of that about ukrainian history russian history but there's a real sense i think in which i mean we did a podcast quite early on in the whole course of the rest of history about the 1990s and i've been thinking a lot about the 90s this year and how many of the things that have as it were gone wrong how many of them started in the 90s so

russia taking this turn into this sort of weimar Germany sort of abyss, if you like. Reality TV? Right, the career of Matt Hancock. No, but I think when people write about this year, they will see this as the moment when the immediate post-Cold War era ended. Don't you think? Yeah. More so, actually, I would would say now this might be controversial than september the 11th because september the 11th now feels like of course it's a massive moment

in american history but in world history i wonder whether it's quite as significant now as we thought it was 20 years ago you might say it's too early to tell you might say that because because the 9-11 people thought was was a decisive world moment because it was felt as presaging clash of civilizations yeah and it was all about tensions between the west and islam and that sense i think has definitely faded but it's it's not impossible to imagine you know cycles of terrorist attacks or something that might regenerate that and i guess the kind of you know the the sense of strain hasn't faded. It hasn't gone away.

No. In terms of pressures on the frontiers of Europe. Tom, there's people outside trying to shut you down. Force their way in. Yeah. So, I mean, I would say that, you know, in 2005 or was it 2015 when there was the migration crisis? Yeah, 2015 or so.

So I would say back then, if you'd done a kind of end of the year, you'd say these are seismic issues. But they faded. They seem to have less saliency now, even though in Britain one of the things that has dominated the headlines is people trying to cross the Channel in small boats. So that is obviously kind of bubbling away. But I agree, it doesn't seem to have the salience that say, the threat of superpower conflict does. Because back in 2001, 9-11 seemed so shocking, because it interrupted what people had assumed was an era of kind of constant peace, where the very idea of, you know, countries going to war was kind of over, or at least, you know, countries in the west but i think the ukrainian war also feels that it has this resonance because we're living in a period where the assumptions of western liberal democracy are embattled anyway so post-financial crisis post i mean you mentioned the migration crisis brexit the rise of china all these different things mean that the sense of unity and kind of complacency i guess that you would associate with western democracy certainly in the 1990s that has really completely fractured

and so the ukrainian war is it and sorry really miss it well i love being complacent but don't you think now that i i definitely think now that after what happened in february and then the the the slaughter that has followed you know i look back on what on the events of the 1990s and think it was all just a complete illusion i mean i'm sounding a little bit like adam curtis here but yeah but i mean yeah let's have a jump cut to people throwing a ball about in a 1950s american swimming pool yes and oddly oddly jarring music. But so Adam Curtis, for those people who don't know, is this brilliantly talented BBC filmmaker who creates these documentaries that are kind of,

they're a combination of a collage and a conspiracy theory, and I don't mean that too harshly. And he had a brilliant new series on Russia, didn't he, on the post-Soviet history of Russia, entirely made up of footage that he sourced. So no commentary or anything. And Dominic, weren't you watching one of those episodes on a train, on a laptop?

Well, I think our club members will have heard this anecdote already. So Tom and I, we did two episodes, didn't we, about the history of treason at the National Archives. And on my way down to the National Archives on the train, I was watching, I can't remember, it was episode three, episode four of that series. And on my laptop, because I was so addicted to it, it's such an immersive series, it plunges you into that

very Weimar Republic world of mid-1990s Russia, in which the economy had completely collapsed, living standards had collapsed and so on, enormous political turmoil. So I was watching this on my laptop with my headphones, very crowded train and um it suddenly the the sort of there's no voiceover so they use captions the caption on the screen said people turn to unusual ways to make money and i thought oh no what's coming now

and then the camera the picture cut to a couple very very explicitly having sex in front of some cameras on their bed sort of this amateur couple and i thought oh god it'll just be for a moment and then over the life i crashed but no the scene went on and on i was sitting next to this young woman who's very smartly dressed kind of she was ostentatiously like looking at her work for the day. And I thought, oh, I can't bet. This is so excruciating. So I tried to sort of fast forward to the next scene or something on the BBC iPlayer, which I have to say is a very clumsy bit of online technology.

Because as soon as I moved the thing on, the picture just froze. And I had this sort of circle on the screen going around and around the picture froze you just hurled it out of the window very very unfortunate close up pull the emergency cord and and i could feel my face absolutely burning and i and i so i sort of even though i had my headphones on i sort of very very artificially and inauthentically said, oh, for God's sake, or something. And then closed the laptop in a great sort of, in a great bit of a lava, I think it's fair to say. Anyway, so obviously for that reason,

for that reason, Russia has been much on my mind. Well, it's obviously, there was a real sense, I think, in 2022, for the first time, I would say certainly since September the 11th, since 2001 of an existential struggle don't you think I mean there was a real a feeling that a lot of people found a cause they found it a heroic figure in Vladimir Zelensky of a kind that really in the western world we haven't really put anyone on a pedestal people have got slightly bored with it in the west oh yes definitely. And slightly resentful of...

Well, I think there have always been people who have been more bored and resentful than others. I mean, most famously in Germany. I mean, there have been German politicians who basically said explicitly to the Ukrainians in the early days of the operation, look, it would just be better if you lose right now. But what did they had? So, I mean, you're saying things are bad now, but what if Zelensky had fled

or taken the lift that he got offered by the Americans, which he famously turned down, and the Russians had occupied Kiev? What would, where would we be now?

Where would we be? That is a fascinating question, isn't it? Would the West have basically accepted the fate of grumbled imposed some sanctions but accepted the fate of complete maybe they would i don't know and what would the implications of that have been for ga politics i guess for for the security of europe and for china's um plans well i mean you you know what i'm going to say which is that um i think

there would have been very baleful implications. Of course, you could say that actually this would merely have been the continuation of a pattern because effectively nobody, I mean, there was a small bit of a fuss in sort of grand terms in 2014 when Russia took Crimea, when Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008. Again, very little fuss in the West. Even going back to, so to go back to that Adam Curtis documentary, the final episodes of it, which are unbelievably harrowing, I have to say, are about the war in Chechnya. And that was an unbelievably brutal campaign, just the complete destruction of the capital city, Grozny. And effectively, people in the West saying, well, we don't care. You know, it's an internal Russian affair.

We'll just leave the Chechens to their fate. They just have to suck it up, basically. So had Putin taken Kyiv, had Zelensky fled, had Ukraine, let's say, been partitioned, then I think that would have i mean putin would just have said well this is just great this is more and you may well have started eyeing the baltic states do you think or do you think native membership would have well isn't one lesson i mean listen we're getting into politics here and i know our listeners will have some of our listeners

will have very strong views so i'm not intending to to just lecture them and pretend my own personal opinion is the gospel truth. But my own view is that NATO membership is clearly worth something. Yeah. Because if you are Latvia or Estonia, countries with a very large Russian minority. And Finland and Sweden, who've both joined. Have just both joined. So if you are Latvia or Estonia with a large Russian-speaking population, you know, maybe 30, 40% of the population, you would say, my goodness,

NATO membership is what is actually guaranteeing our independence and our inviolability. And had it were not for NATO membership, we would undoubtedly be next on the menu. The other podcast we did, in addition to the episodes on Ukraine and the rise of Putin,

that has kind of haunted me ever since we did it is the one we did with Helen Thompson on oil we did two episodes on oil and this was I think it went out before the invasion and she was already in a very kind of baneful mood about the whole thing and she was talking of the risk of basic I mean she put Europe's dilemma in a really fascinating historical context that essentially ever since the coal-based economy came to be replaced by the oil-based economy europe's been stuck because it doesn't have the oil reserves that russia and the united states had and that in a sense that doomed the european colonial empires and therefore doomed the centrality of europe in the global geopolitical system.

And it does seem that the invasion of Ukraine has kind of turbocharged the threat of deindustrialization that has always stalled Europe, I think. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's a little bit like we did an episode, didn't we, just over a year ago about 1973 and the oil weapon. So it feels a little bit like 1973 in that regard. So what happened in 1973 with the oil crisis was that it laid bare what experts and insiders had already known, of course, which was the West's complete dependence on imported energy, on Middle Eastern oil. But that included the United States. And now the United States is not dependent.

It's exporting its gas. it's fracking away you know it can impose sanctions on russia with a fraction of the damage that it's doing to europe to the european union and to to britain so helen thompson's argument is is that in the long run you'll see this great divergence or you know there's a serious possibility of a great divergence between europe and the united states both economically and politically because of our our energy dependence i suppose the counter argument would be that nobody would have anticipated before this year just how resilient nato the western alliance would be in the face of that's looking at it half full isn't it yeah i'm a very half full person tom you're half empty and of course um one rosy thing and i know how you love optimism don't you dominic i'm very optimistic and you love a bit of isn't it? Yeah. I'm a very half full person, Tom. You're half empty. And of course, one rosy thing,

and I know how you love optimism, don't you, Dominic? I'm very optimistic. And you love a bit of science. I do. The prospect of cold fusion, which seems to have come a little bit closer,

which has been the energy holy grail for years, for decades. Because I think there were some British scientists who announced that they'd done it in the 90s and everyone went terribly excited and they couldn't reproduce it. But this does look as if it might be a bit rosier. And people are talking about it coming online in about a decade.

But another technological innovation of the year that may be historically very important that has got lots of attention, has actually got a lot of attention from our Restless History Club members, is AI. So there's been the launch in the last couple of weeks of this new AI. Yes, because one of the club members

got the AI bot to write a Daily Mail column in praise of Argentina's behaviour in the World Cup in the style of Dominic Sambro. Well, I've seen, I've been sent quite a few of these, so I sent one yesterday. It read very convincingly. And if I were you, i'd be very worried for your future employment because why would the daily mail pay you to come out with this stuff when they can employ a bot i'll tell you why because the bot is not polemical enough because i've been sent a few of these by our club members

so i sent one where the bot was asked to write a one of my columns complaining that woke warriors had abolished the carthaginian practice of child sacrifice. And I pointed out that the, the AI, the AI is very much on the one hand, on the other hand, is it? And of course,

in column writing, you can only ever really have one hand on. Yeah. Okay. So your job is safe for now. There's a lot to learn. Yeah. It reads too much like an A-level essay.

Very balanced. A list of factors. Okay. But that's not what the public want to read. Okay, so there's hope for the human race yet. And on that cheery note, we'll go for a break. And when we come back, well, it'll be the very, very last podcast half of the year. We'll see you then.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The rest is history we are looking back at the events of 2022 in a in a sort of rambling style well we've which we we should remind listeners that we're doing this after the episode we did with henry jeffries on the history of booze and he brought along some port he did he's given us about three glasses and if you yeah if you've heard people around us that's kind of revelous isn't it people having their christmas lunches departing very well oiled um from being decanted by from various places at berry brothers and bradwell we are so tom i'll tell you what a lot of people in britain will remember the year for without any question that, that's the death of Her Late Majesty, Elizabeth II. Well, there's been a lot of royal news.

Yes. They're not going to remember it for Harry and Meghan, let's be honest. Well, they might. I mean, history books are always interested in badly behaving younger sons, aren't they? They are. There's a tension between the elder and younger son. Ludicrous self-serving misbehavior yeah has never failed to interest you know an earlier generation of young son would go off and side with

the king of france and try and annex gascony yeah um and now they go off to california and make self-pitying videos to be fair he wants to avoid publicity tom he does yes he does so the yeah so the death of the queen i'm sure that that will be used by historians as a bookend oh absolutely very very convenient isn't it yeah i mean i remember we discussed this in our episode on the queen and we said it kind of depends what happens you know in the next few years because obviously queen victoria's death coincided pretty much with the end of the 19th century and then the first world war came along. And I suppose if terrible things happen.

Then it'll be the perfect literary device. Yes, it really will. Exactly. I mean, I think for me, what was striking about it, looking back, is there was always part of me that feared, in my sort of John Bullish way, that when the Queen died, people wouldn't react. You know, people wouldn't react you know people wouldn't care they'd be much less you know moved by it than i thought they should be and i was actually really surprised how moved people were and how rapidly every pretty much every single institution in the

land rushed to put on the kind of the garb of mourning and the sort of the the almost instinctiveness with which a huge proportion of the public in britain embraced the idea of mourning the queen of you know that this was an important moment all of this kind of thing i mean there were of course there were and still are republicans or people who don't, but there are fewer of them than I thought there would be. You got cross with me for using the word weird to describe it. I'm still cross about that, Tom. I can't believe you'd bring it up. Well, I'm going to justify it because weird in the old English sense of things that are too strange to be contained within the kind of diurnal rhythms of everyday life.

Like Liz Truss. Well, exactly like Liz Truss. So she got put on, I mean, yeah, we'll come to her in a minute. But the sense that the British state is really quite odd, you know, it hasn't been kind of pulled down completely and kind of start again from scratch. So I've just been actually been writing a feature on king edgar in the 10th century right who and saint dunstan uh the archbishop canterbury who was famous for um recognizing the devil when

he came into his forge and grabbing the devil by his nose with a pair of tongs so this this dunstan what the devil was after up to no good he's the devil dominic the devil walks into your forge you don't have to say so dunstan was a blacksmith what's he doing in the forge he's a humble lad who grows up to you know fulfills every young lad's dream of becoming archbishop of canterbury and the devil came into his forge the devil came into his forge after a horseshoe or something i imagine he was up to no good dominic that is what the devil does okay i mean yeah i didn't expect to get here from okay but but this is this is the measure of how weird it all is so this saint dunstan who is attacking

the devil with a pair of tongs he's also the guy who devises the coronation order that is spoken when the person who i'd go to for when king edgar in the middle of the 10th century is crowned in bath amid the splendors of the roman. And that order of service for the coronation inspires the French order of service. It has influence on German and Italian royalty. But it's pretty much the basis for the coronation ritual that will be in Westminster Abbey when the king gets crowned next year. I'd like to think we'll do an episode about this, Tom. And I, what I felt about the mourning for the queen was people kind of getting in touch with a sense of the antiquity of things in this country,

an order that is so old that it does feature archbishops who go around attacking devils with tongs and quite enjoying it. I mean, people were, people were people were sad but i think they quite enjoyed being sad and they quite enjoyed the sense that everything had kind of stopped and for a while we weren't having to worry about list trusts or uh energy bills or whatever and we could all just queue up and it's quite a peculiar country in that it there's a large section of the british intelligentsia that has a very

hostile attitude towards its own flag and displays of well this is the george orwell thing about rather stealing from the poor box rather stealing from the poor box exactly but of course we don't really have a national day we don't really have many national sort of overtly patriotic national rituals so actually this was very unusual a chance for people to go out into the streets to watch the bands to watch the the parades all of that sort of stuff we don't get many of those so i thought it was interesting that i mean she died in scotland yeah and again you have to wonder was that you know did she know that death was in near is that why she went to balmoral because that gave it a real charge and i think the scots

were i mean they're much less they're much about the monarchy, I think, in general, than the English. But there was a sense that the rituals of the morning were very, you know, they were very Scottish, they were kind of played out in Edinburgh. And then, of course, they were played out in London. I think there was much more scepticism in Wales. And we talked, we touched on this in our episode that we did for the world cup on wales i mean we kind of made a joke of it but there is a kind of interesting ambivalence in prince william yeah who you know from early on had identified himself with english football team is now the prince of wales and when england were playing wales and you know he dead batted the question he did which team he was like she was not happy so you can under you i think you could understand why in Wales, perhaps they were less touched. But I think in both England and Scotland, there was a sense that people were in touch

with an order that went back a very, very long way. And rather than feeling contemptuous of it, people quite enjoyed it. Yeah, I think that's right. I think as well, of course, you mentioned the fact that it was an escape from the political headlines. Right, so let's come to that.

So this will also be remembered in Britain and perhaps around the world, because I think that the chaos of this year did win global embarrassment for Britain. I think internationally, there was a feeling that British government was basically stable, that it provided stable governance. People say that all the time. This is the kind of nonsense they say and the rest is politics i think that is anyone who says that just exhibits their complete ignorance go on then justify that i just said it so i'm no because you didn't say you didn't you didn't say that you thought it you said you thought people abroad said it and i think you're right that people let's say opinion op-ed writers at the New York Times says, what's happened to Britain?

And people always, Robert Harris-ish people, I like Robert Harris a lot, I'm not slagging him off. I think he said this in an interview with you in The Spectator, which is why I'm constantly... Yes, at now, so you can read that, folks. He came back from Germany and said, oh, people in Germany were saying, what's happened to Britain? They always organise everything so well. And I thought, what harold wilson 1975

no you know margaret thatcher in 1980 won the most unpopular but it's the difference between um proportional representation and first past the post there's a general feeling if you win an election then you serve your term and that's why the the drama of mrs thatcher's deposition was was so was so brilliant was it didn't actually happen very often yeah or the 1920s. So in that 1922 podcast, we're talking about an enormous political turmoil. What is it?

Three elections in as many years. Governments rising and falling. By and large, post-war, I mean, you've written the books on it. You need to suck eggs here. But by and large,

if you win an election and you're the leader of a party, you lead it through to the next election. I mean, I know in the 70s it got slightly queer. So in the mid-50s, 55 to 57, you're free prime minister. But Mr. Satcher was prime minister for what?

Ever. Yeah, 11 years. Kind of 11 years. Major was prime minister for seven years. Seven years, yeah. Blair was prime minister for 10 years. Brown was quite short, but Cameron had kind of five, six years, did he? Yeah.

And then since then, it's just been kind of five six years did he yeah and then since then it's just been kind of getting shorter and shorter and shorter so may was i mean you know disastrous and chaotic johnson was disastrous and chaotic and then trust bet you know i mean she's the lady jane gray of she is poor i mean the thing about this trust is poor woman and the thing i feel sorry for her yeah well is this the peerage thing again? No, no, no. That's actually the thought, Tom. You're not going to get a peerage from this trust.

It's the thought of having to go and stand in the... The cenotaph. The cenotaph forever. But as you said, it's like a Greek... It's like Sisyphus pushing up his rock. Yeah. For the rest of her life, she'll be forced to go to the cenotaph. It's a terrible purgatorial punishment.

Quite soon. Probably in about eight years, people will start saying, who's that? She'll be like Lepidus, the guy who was left, you know, from the second triumvirate, who lingered on in a kind of phantasmal impotence for the rest of his life.

Yes. Yeah, because presumably she can't make an enormous amount of money from the speaking circuit. I mean, would you pay? I would have thought she'd be in huge demand for her advice on poor market opening up poor markets the economic and political stability um well who knows i don't know i think you see the the massive turmoil in prime ministers is really ultimately symptomatic of it's a couple of things

isn't it it's post-brexit it's definitely brexit it's brexit but it's also you know covid the horrendous economic challenges that we're facing so the system has really been buckling under the pressure how much worse are we doing than other countries but i don't think we are doing that i mean this is the this is the because i look at graphs yeah i don't really i don't really understand graphs this is the most absolutely tip-top i know but i know, I know. So there'll be somebody saying Britain's terrible. You know, whatever, we're awful. Vote Remain or Labour or whatever.

That's generally what they do say. Yeah, I know. And the graphs will show terrible. And then there'll be two or three people saying, actually, no, we're all fine. Everything's great. Liz Truss was brilliant. She was wrong. Here are some graphs proving it. Tom is proving that he spends far too much time on twitter but you but you must have come across the i'm very conscious of the graph because

i don't understand because if there are people out there who can to assure me to attempt to steer this podcast back towards a history podcast the trend for printing those graphs in history because you know they're very few you do get graphs i don't ignore very you know the trend for producing those really is a post-war thing and actually i would say that probably peaked in about the 70s and the 80s when the newspapers would print these every you know every week showing how we were falling behind and it would always print only those that showed britain at the bottom you know productivity worse than italy italy is always the benchmark still is actually people will say worse than italy as though it's i mean this is actually a perfectly functioning you know successful country

well no now it's worse than poland is is it oh is italy worse than poland is worse than poland now we're yeah interesting now well of course yes i suppose because they've they've eastern europe has now been brought into the graph orbit but But I think, actually, when you look at a lot of these graphs, so people would say to me all the time, we did worse than anybody on COVID. We did worse than anybody on this. Well, we didn't in the end, did we? No, we did mid-table.

Mid-table. I think we were mid-table on actually quite a lot of things. We weren't wolves, but we were Villa. Well, you'll be wolves at the end of the season with our new manager, Mr Lopategi. Anyway, you can come back at the end of the season and see how that prediction has worked out. He's the one whose dad was a Basque stone thrower.

Stone lifter. Basque stone lifter. So no, I don't think we actually have done quite as badly. I think it's become an annoying reflex. I just want us to do better than the French. Well, yeah, well... I don't really care about the others. Obviously, we shouldn't just mention the World Cup at all. Oh, i don't mind about that because uh you're so delighted about cricket no

but also it's win-win for me england against france because um i have france in the sweep state there's been a lot of suspicions about unsound and unpatriotic behavior on this podcast and that is the proof no i think i mean we we did a stage show didn't we where we were comparing the the political turmoil in britain with the Year of the Four Emperors, a subject very close to your heart. Yes, the theme of a book that is coming out next year in July packs and will be available from all good bookshops. And one

of the interesting things to talk about in that was that the Year of the Four Emperors, as you've said, it's not indicative of a wider sickness in the Roman political system. It turns out not to be. Although there are plenty of people at the time who worry that it is. It's pure faction fighting, isn't it?

This feels like, you know, it's a struggle to deal with massive economic challenges, I would say. One of the things I also wonder is whether, I mean, one of the things to be said about the chaos in Britain over the past few years is that it's certainly been very democratic yeah there's been lots of votes have enabled people who otherwise wouldn't have a voice to

force referendums and to have their you know all that kind of thing and uh separate parts of the fabric of the state have been given votes on independence and all kinds of things like that over the past decade yeah and that's something that that seems very marked and perhaps we're just kind of airing problems that in other countries are, you know, being hidden behind the furniture. So if you were to control it. I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to cheer myself up. I'm not trying to cheer myself up.

I know what other countries to go through what we've gone through. But, Tom, I think that's a completely legitimate thing to say, actually, because the obvious contrast that people make is with Germany. And people will say, well, the Germans, you know, they never have any of this issue. They just plod along. Angela Merkel, wasn't she great? And all this sort of stuff. But of course, a lot of the, we did a podcast after Merkel left, didn't we?

Where we were looking at the sweep of German chancellors. I'm very proud that we nailed Schroeder then as a wrongman. We did, yeah. The Lord of the Rings, as they called him, because there was multiple, what did they call him? Audi man. Yeah, and then the Olympics.

Because there was multiple marriages. And basically now he's married to Vladimir Putin's money, isn't he? Yes, he is. That's what he's married to now. And he's behaved really disgracefully. But actually, you know, now people look back at the Merkel tenure and they say, what a terrible mistake it was to jump into bed with Russia, to do the Nord Stream deal, to basically play the part of, I mean, this will sound very harsh to some listeners, so I don't really mean this to be as extreme as it sounds, but to play the part of kind of 1930s appeasers. I mean, that's some of

the criticism that Merkel gets now. She wasn't really appeasing though, was she? She was on the phone to Putin every week, once a week. Yeah not not not because she was appeasing him but because she wanted his gas i'm not sure is that better i mean no but it's different yeah it is different it's different you know it's you know appeasement is the is obviously the great bogey word that you you appease because you're frightened yeah i don't think she was frightened i think she just wanted you know she wanted the gas but i don't think appeasement appeasers were frightened either. I think they thought they could fix. I think they were frightened. I don't think they were frightened.

Bomber will always get through. Yeah, but that's just a throwaway. I mean, attacking Stanley Baldwin is not something I welcome at the end of the year. I'm not. I'm citing him. At the end of the year podcast. Approvingly. All right.

We've probably done enough political wittering, have we? Let's talk about some of our highlights of the year. So first of all, Tom, podcasting highlights. We have done done i sent you a text the other day didn't i and i said i think we've done in the last 12 months i work not including bonus episodes for our club members we've done an episode of the rest is history every two days that's amazing so that's something like just under yeah we did just over 150 sl. Massively slanted by the World Cup. So do you have any highlights you want to pick out for people who perhaps haven't listened to all that? I know it's hard to believe there are such people who haven't listened to everything we've put out this year.

If I chose two that would illustrate the sweep. sweep so one of the things that i really enjoy about doing the podcast is when we do subjects that turn out completely to surprise me and we are able to kind of think the issues through kind of live so unrehearsed yeah and i think the episode that most surprised me and and that in a way i was kind of most nervous about going out but also felt that we'd really got to grips with quite meaty issues was the episode we did on Senegal for the World Cup. So those who haven't heard the World Cup episodes, we took an aspect of the history of every country that was in the World Cup and we kind of divvied it up, didn't we? And there were some countries that obviously we knew less about than others. Costa Rica. Costa Rica being the prime example.

But Senegal I took because I had this image of the door of no return, the door through which 2 million Africans, it is said, were taken to America in slavery. And so I wanted to know more about that. And the process of discovering what that was, what it had been, the controversies around it, I found, you know, kind of really, really fascinating to discuss that and to research that. And then at the other end, I thought the episode on pigeons was an absolute triumph.

So the origin of that was that I met, I sat next to Gordon Carrera, who is the BBC security correspondent at a carol service this time last year. He's absolutely lovely man. He said he listened to the podcast and he was dying to do an episode on pigeons because he'd written a book about the role played by pigeons in the First and Second World War. And I thought this was a great idea. All in favour of doing episodes on animals. And I'd love to do more. And I asked you and you did you poo poo it i guess anyway i persuaded you and we were kind of seeding it

and say telling people we're doing this episode people didn't believe it they thought you're making and in the event i thought the episode was fascinating it was fascinating he was a great guest so so i think those two would be the two that I would. And I would pick, so I'm going to pick two series that we did. I would pick, first of all, something that we were quite anxious about. It was the American Civil War. So we had a guest, Adam Smith, from the University of Oxford, an old crony of mine, who's an expert on the American Civil War.

But it was that we were anxious about doing it as three Brits, for an audience that includes a lot of Americans. Yeah. And it seemed to go down pretty well. And I just thought it's such a fascinating subject. And Adam did it all in one afternoon, didn't he? I mean, he did about four hours. And he had to go to America the next day, didn't he?

He was really heroic. So I really enjoyed that. And the other one that just you and and i did because sometimes we do these sort of very detailed narratives to do with a single individual and it was young churchill i loved doing that i thought it was such so packed with incident and drama and he was more than gordon because i did enjoy general gordon was that this year i think it was it seems like a lifetime ago. Yeah. So those are two, those are companion series really, aren't they? Because they're about empire. Imperial daring do.

Yeah. I mean, I kind of knew about Churchill to a degree, but I really didn't know much about Gordon. And so rather in the process of discovery. And the thing I loved about Gordon was that a figure who I had always seen as a slightly risible figure, because Lytton Strachey made him one of the eminent Victorians and kind of laughed at him for being sexually repressed and all this kind of stuff. And actually, when you situate him in the context of his age, I mean, he seemed to me a properly heroic figure. Yeah. In a way that I think today, we'd be, that kind of, that model of heroism would make us nervous.

And yeah, I agreed. I agree. And just before we go, Tom, a couple of other highlights from the year. So I know you're a great museum goer, walker, exhibition goer and so on. Is there anything that stands out for you? There was an absolutely brilliant exhibition that I think is still on at the british library um about alexander the great and it's less about alexander himself than about how alexander has been seen throughout time and across the world so it it you know there's there's a cartoon in which superman has to

rescue margaret thatcher who's been kidnapped by Alexander the Great which I thought was unexpected that is unexpected um and at the other extreme you know there are kind of medieval Chinese portrayals of him and all this kind of stuff I mean it's an incredible exhibition and it has so much material from so many different corners of the world uh so it's on in London the British Library I highly recommend that selection of books in the gift shop I understand well that helps as well yes it does it has books by both of us so my exhibition would be i think i mentioned this to our club members it's a museum just outside our house in denmark uh it's an absolutely wonderful museum with the most amazing um extremely sort of high-tech uh exhibitions and displays on the vikings and kind of medieval denmark but they had a particular exhibition on the roos on the Vikings and kind of medieval Denmark.

But they had a particular exhibition on the Rus, on the Vikings in the East. And we did a couple of episodes this year on the Vikings in the East. When I saw they had this, I thought, how can you do such a thing? Because there's actually not that much stuff. And it's such an apparently obscure and bizarre area of history. So the foundation of Kiev and the foundations of Russia and Ukraine and all this.

St. Olga, a great favourite of yours, Tom, burning the Derevlians alive and so on. And they did it brilliantly. It was incredibly interesting. They basically recreated the whole route and the sort of log canoes that they would have had going down the rivers, down the Dnieper and down the Volga. And then as you went through the rooms, you basically ended up in Constantinople and then in Baghdad. So it was brilliantly done.

I think that's an exhibition I shall remember to my dying day. The Scandinavians do really good museums. They do. So I went to Copenhagen and saw they've redone the National Museum. And the Viking display there is really superb. Yeah. Really, really superb. I think one reason they do them actually is because what was very obvious to me from Aarhus is that they just don't have the anguish that has entered into the sort of museum, the curatorial world in Britain.

So the captions were all comprehensible, Not so many abstract nouns. There wasn't the sort of hand-wringing and apology and all that sort of stuff that we are now so familiar with. So it was sort of the Vikings took slaves, the Vikings behaved very violently. Well, I felt that they could have been a bit more apologetic because there was an awful lot of English gold and silver there. So I did think that

a little bit of apology in fact contemplates ending it. Did you suffer harm, Tom? I did. I did you suffer harm i did i did yes i did oh that's very sad so i would love to go and see that that one and i recommend the um that the national museum in copenhagen and any any books stand out i know you read a brilliant book about the vikings this year didn't you uh children's book well dominic i'm not yeah i mean basic so basically i've i've been working so hard, Dominic, so hard.

I haven't really had time to read anything that wasn't about the Romans or to do with, um, the rest of history, the rest of history. And there've been some great books that that has enabled me to read. So yeah, Andrew Wolfe's book on, uh,

the romantics. Yes. Um, Edward Shawcross book on, uh, that was a great, I'm sure there are others that, that I could could uh i could

pluck uh and of course fury of the northman uh by yourself fear the vikings the vikings it's such it's so memorable and i should say that we just we had a cut just before this and dominic told me to say that so i still couldn't still go wrong it's shocking but it's brilliant it is it is brilliant full of stirring stuff about king alfred but dominic the real service you've done me this year yeah and i don't want you to think that i never listen to you and i never take your advice yeah so you made two book recommendations that i tom is reaching under the table i'm wondering what you're gonna get out the first we did an episode on uh the welsh and patagonia yeah we did and you mentioned uh malcolm price oh there it is last tango and aborist so these are a series of novels that cast aborist with as the equivalent

of raymond chandler's los angeles and it's very surreal very funny and great detective stories so i've just gone and got the uh the that series. God, you're really addicted to them now. I have. And, Dominic, I've just gone and bought Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander, this terrible book full of rope. The whole time I've been doing the rest of history, I've said I absolutely, you know, I tried it. I thought it's unreadable. And so many people have said, no, you've got to give it a go. And I've just blanked them because I felt that they were wrong but um we did a big series on trafalgar and nelson now that was i got massively into nelson and the royal navy and all that kind of stuff and so i did think i should give it another go and so um so i've got i've got i've got master and commander by patrick o'brien

and i've got last tango in aberystwith by malcolm price which i'll probably have read by the time you're listening to this because I'm going to be reading them after Christmas. So thank you Dominic. Those are both your recommendations. You're very welcome. I do pay attention to what you say. And yourself? Because you read a lot because you review books. My book for the Sunday Times is a book called The Restless Republic by Anna Kay. And is she coming on the show? And she is coming on the show in a couple of months, I think.

It's all about England in the 1650s. So that's the era of the Cromwellian era. But the great thing about it, what I loved about it, is it was so attentive to ordinary life. So it's not just politics so cromwell is there

and there's lots of stuff about the major generals and all that kind of carry on but there are people telling each other funny stories and eating pies and falling out of windows yes exactly women call goody there's a there's a vicar who amuses his neighbors with tales of a character he's made up called mr prick there's all this kind of stuff which i think is brilliant because i've always wanted to know what life was like yeah and all of course so she's coming on the show and actually another guest who we've got coming on the show um in a couple of months wrote one of my other books the which is a book called tourists so she's lucy lethbridge and we did a series about. The book came out just as we were doing the research for it.

The book came out about four days before we did the podcast. So basically the podcast just turned into us reading enormous chunks from the book out. But she was very sporting about it. And she's coming on to talk about the real Downton Abbey. Because about five or six years ago, she did a brilliant book called Servants about the colossal numbers of people

who were in domestic service um and i'm sure that episode would be brilliant and actually that leads us to our last thing which is what we've got coming up in 2023 because we've got our tour we're doing a nation well a very short national tour in april um london the glittering heart of london's west end dominic the oldest theatre in the West End, I think. Is that right? Something like that, yeah. The oldest theatre that's always been a continuous theatre. So they've got Frozen on at the moment.

Soon Tom Holland. Yeah. Singing Marilyn. Yeah. So we've got the tour, but we've also got episodes coming up very soon in the new year. We have a slightly grim series, but an important series, about the rise of the Nazis. Before that, we've got Jonathan Friedland talking about

The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz, which we've already recorded and are amazing. Yes. We've got our long-awaited couple of episodes on Lady Jane Grey. We have indeed. So that will be coming in January. And then looking further forward, we're hoping to get into subjects

such as Columbus and his voyages and his place in history. The Ides of March. The Ides of March. Which will obviously be going out on the Ides of March. The Spanish conquest of Mexico. We are going to...

Phoenicians. Yeah, we're doing the Phoenicians. We're doing Jezebel. Jezebel, yeah. Herodotus is coming. Yeah. The Profumo scandal is coming. The coronation.

Hundred Years' War. Hundred Years' War. The Cathars. And Ronald Reagan, a couple of episodes on Reagan. Was that a little hint of a Ronald Reagan? Just a little teaser there, folks. Just a little teaser. Gosh.

You've been in Barry Brothers and Rudd too long, Tom. We can't start degenerating to Ronald Reagan impersonations now. We will be doing the American War of Independence. We will be doing East Germany. And we will be doing JFK, his life, his death, and the many theories surrounding his killer. So that's all yet to come in 2023. And we hope you'll join us.

If you enjoyed this, the rambling, unfocused, chaotic nature of this podcast. We actually do this every week in our bonus episodes for Members of the Restless History Club. And so I'm afraid a lot of the wangs, as we call them, named after the young lads who General Gordon looked after, they will have heard a lot of these anecdotes before. So I apologise to them. I think I've heard them more than once, Tom. Probably.

To be fair. Probably. But you can join up to the Rest Is History Club at restlesshistorypod.com and that will give you early access to all our live shows. You'll get the bonus episodes. You'll get loads of other treats. Incredible quality, isn't it? It's amazing quality.

And incredible value. Very good value. Of course, if you didn't enjoy the rambling and focused nature of this, then you've lost nothing other than an hour of your time. And you can just carry on as a normal listener. Although, of course, we do hope that people will join the club, don't we? Because we're all about community. We're all about community.

Yeah. So on that very, very public-spirited note, we should wish you all a very happy new year. And we look forward to... We won't be seeing you in 2023, but we look forward to you hearing from us. We might be seeing some of them in 2023. If they come to London or Edinburgh or Manchester. So we look forward to you hearing from us. We might be seeing some of them in 2023. If they come to London or Edinburgh or Manchester.

So we look forward either to seeing you or to you sitting in silence listening to us. With rapt attention. Later in the new year. So a very happy new year to you all and goodbye. Happy new year. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com