The Rest Is History - Bonus Episode: No Time to Die

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

WARNING: THIS PODCAST INCLUDES SPOILERS ABOUT THE NEW JAMES BOND MOVIE. DO NOT LISTEN UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN THE FILM. What does the new Bond movie tell us about modern masculinity? And where does the franchise go from here? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland share notes on No Time to Die. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Email: [e-mail] 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 a special bonus, dare I say, guerrilla edition of The Restless History. A couple of weeks ago Dominic and I did an episode on James Bond, timed to coincide with No Time to Die. At the time, of course, we hadn't seen it. Dominic, we now have, both of us seen it. Yeah, independently, I should say.

We didn't get together. That would be too much Rest Is History for... Yes. But here we are to perhaps just pick the bones of our viewing experience, not because this is turning into a cinema podcast, but because you are a top historian of modern Britain. Top historian.

A top historian. Possibly the top historian of modern Britain. That is kind. There are academics all over Britain pulling their hair out. What I will say is that no one is better yeah nobody does it better no one does it better than you um at taking things that may not kind of seem obvious to hold a mirror up to uh to british society and you show that it does. So you do it with sport, you do it with music and you do it with film.

That's very kind of you, Tom. You know, I'm a massive fan. You're a kind person. So imagine that, that, that you are writing a history of Britain in the 2020s.

Yeah. In the 2050s or 60s. So let's hope you're still going on there. Elon Musk has given you a kind of life serum right to keep you on track yeah um what what do you think what do you think you might what uses do you think you might put no time to die oh and actually before you answer that yeah i really need to flag up to anyone listening who's reached this far this is going to be absolutely stuff full with spoilers and if you haven't seen the film

and you want to see the film and you don't know what's going to happen for goodness sake don't listen to this because this is going to be unapologetically full of spoilers that's very good advice massive spoiler that we will undoubtedly be discussing so don't listen to this if

you want to see the film you haven't seen it if you haven't seen it don't um don't don't keep listening i mean that's a very weird thing to say in our own podcast but well the key thing to do is go to this film then as soon as you've got out the film listen to the podcast to find out what you should think of the film or rather what what top historian of modern britain dominic sandbrook thinks of the film because dominic sandbrook thinks of the film because dominic what would you what would you say uh it tells us about modern britain does it tell us about anything yeah of course it does um so in our bond podcast we talked about bond as a symbol of britishness we talked about bond and masculinity um and we talked about how that had changed didn't

we between the books and the films and over the course of the film so the different kind of incarnations of the character and it's obviously a film i mean the the portrait of masculinity in daniel craig's bond has always been really interesting so he's he's never had the insouciance of roger moore has he or of connery he's always been tortured and sort of troubled and um and obviously in this film he's in retirement at the beginning so he's walked away from uh the secret service um and he has this sort of slightly i mean the film has great fun doesn't it with that with bond as the kind of he's becoming outsider so at one point he's working for the cia his number's been reassigned and and of course given to a black woman you know the very antithesis of james bond yes okay so so on that um he he's living in jamaica yeah he's retired to jamaica

ian fleming had done yeah so he has basically become ian fleming well who and you said and you said you said that ian fleming you know even by the standards of the 1950s was a massive reactionary. Yes, I did. And in moving to Jamaica to basically live this kind of expat colonial lifestyle, he's been replaced by as 007 by a black woman. Yeah. But moving to Jamaica has different connotations now than it would have done in the 1950s. Yeah, but they must be playing with that. Yeah, they are are playing with that but obviously he's moving to he's moved to jamaica in a very kind of cool way he's hanging around and fishing and he's so you could say that i mean i do think that there is a kind of quite a knowing yeah tension there between the i don't think the past of bond and perhaps the future i think that's absolutely true um when he first

meets his replacement she pretends to be a local she's disguised as a local isn't she she offers him a lift on the back of her moped or motorbike or whatever which of course is also brilliant you know um it's not just about race it's also about gender yeah it's now the man clinging on to the woman exactly exactly and then obviously that's i thought that was very well handled the stuff with him and his replacement because of course the film is i mean in some quarters you've seen people saying it was double o woke or whatever which i think is ridiculous because actually i think the film is having quite a lot of fun with that the filmmakers are kind of amused with the idea that a black woman is the new 007 and um they you know all those moments when they walk back through mi6

later in the film and people say oh hello 007 the two of us i thought that was brilliantly done actually i thought that was very funny and and not they didn't sort of lay it on too thick um but obviously what that's sort of playing with is the idea that the that the idea that you see in the guardian every time a bond film is brought out the bond is outdated so we talked about this in our podcast two weeks ago and lo and behold about three days after our podcast went out the guardian ran their obligatory 1200 word why it's now time to retire james did it appear in their excellent saturday supplement uh it might have done is that what you've been publicizing on this podcast behind my back wonderful yes yes i mean not that i don't

endorse all your all your own endorsements obviously um but i may raise an eyebrow roger moore style at some of them um so uh so yeah the film is obviously having some fun with that um craig's craig seems old in the film he's old isn't he yeah i mean he looks old he plays him as because after he went to the uh the premiere and he wore a kind of pink jacket he did there were lots of discussions on and on fashion you know can men over 50 wear pink jackets can there's a man over 50 i read with someone yes apparently they can have you do you own a pink jacket i I should be investing one. Forthwith.

Imminently. Right. Very good. So I think there's that. I think the anxiety. Bond films are always quite good on the anxieties. Good little windows into the anxieties of the day. So, for example, in the 70s, about energy, The Man with the Golden Gun was all about sort of solar energy and stuff.

Obviously, the age of the oil crisis. And this is about nanobots that will kill everybody with a virus. Now, interestingly, it's a virus, you know, that predates the pandemic. Yes, and it's a virus that gets kind of unleashed from a laboratory. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of weird that it got shot before COVID. I mean, famously, it's been parked for basically two years. But we live in an age when people are obsessed

with these kinds of threats, aren't they? Even before the pandemic, we were obsessed with the dangers of science, the dangers of artificial intelligence, of messing with DNA, which this film is, you know, that's what this virus is all about, isn't it? It targets your individual DNA. I think, I mean, it also highlights the way in which um i

think our response to the virus as it hit in a sense had already been scripted for us by films like this yeah that the anxieties about um viruses escaping from labs and kind of spreading across the world i mean it's an absolute staple of science fiction, of zombie films, Planet of the Apes, of all that kind of stuff. And I wonder whether the reluctance of people to countenance the theory that COVID might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan was, in a sense, precisely because it seemed too much of a staple. I'm sure that's true.

From a thriller. That's absolutely true. I think some listeners may remember, some of the older listeners may remember a series in the 1970s called Survivors set in a kind of post-apocalyptic Britain and the title sequence of that always started with a Chinese-looking scientist dropping a kind of test tube or something.

It's a brilliant title sequence, actually. You see it on YouTube. And it kind of breaks and shatters and then you see him on various planes crossing the world and and i always thought as covid started to spread i couldn't help thinking of this title sequence and exactly as you say you sort of think to yourself well because i've seen it in fictional entertainment it therefore can't happen and it will be a ludicrous conspiracy theory if I if I kind of gave into it um but anyway we're getting off topic the bond no I don't think it is I don't think it is off topic because I thought another kind of very um I mean in a way it seems prophetic but I guess it's just kind of working out the the trends in geopolitics is that um it ends on an island kind of between russia and japan with with china lurking

in the background um and this is an island of the kind that that is an absolute staple of bond films you know they it always ends up on islands that's usually you know nuclear missiles and people running around in track suits and all that kind of stuff. Track suits? Well, don't they? I mean, I remember in the 70s. They're wearing kind of boiler suits. The Roger Moore ones. They're kind of boiler suits. Yeah.

I mean, they're not wearing shell suits. That would be hilarious. I was thinking they were wearing kind of, yes, tight-fitting shell suits. Yeah. And these islands always kind of seem to exist in the middle of nowhere. It's not like they have any kind of geopolitical resonance at all. That's right. They're abstracted from reality

whereas this one is and it's cold war relic isn't it but but but it's an indo-pacific flashpoint it's yeah it's because you've got the you've got russian chinese japanese forces wondering what the hell the british are doing there yeah and there's a kind of british task force sailing through as it's been doing in past you know the past few weeks and it kind of hints at the you know the row about the um the submarine program yes the the us uk australian submarine program where world war three will start in real life that's what you're saying so so in a sense like you can imagine the the script writers kind of looking ahead when they start i don't know when they started writing in 2015 2016 something like that and saying well where might the world be you know in in 2020

that's what james bond films often do tom i think they absolutely do that they try to anticipate the you know we we had a we were chuckling in one of our previous podcasts what we're chuckling in all of them but we were chuckling one of them about the majahideen in uh the living daylights you know and and and that now feels like absolutely of its moment that james bond would have gone to afghanistan in the mid-1980s and kind of got involved with the majahideen they're very good i think at at kind of getting what's in the air um but getting But getting a virus and, you know, Pacific shipping lane tensions right, I mean, is pretty good, I thought. Yeah, I thought it is good. But, I mean, Bond is, so the base is sort of, the fact that it's a Cold War relic, I mean, Bond himself is a Cold War relic, right? I think it's the end of the Second World War, is it sort of um bunker and there's pictures of stalin stuff in there so it feels kind of that's a kind of a nice little nod back to

fleming and the sort of origins roots of bond exactly yeah so right the way through you have a kind of nods knowing nods to um yeah to its origins with ian fleming yeah absolutely but obviously ian fleming would have been ian Fleming would have been appalled by this film. Well, okay. Well, let's take a break now because this is just a short one. We shouldn't go on too long. And when we come back, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what Ian Fleming would have made of it.

Okay. 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

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listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to this special Bond-themed bonus film reviewing episode of The Rest Is History.

Tom, actually, there is a reason why we're doing a film review episode, isn't there? It's not just because we've already done a James Bond podcast. It's because we want to do some shameless promotion for ourselves. We do. Yes, we do. So on the 14th of November, Sunday the 14th of November, we are making, I wouldn't quite call it a big screen debut, but there will be a big screen. So we are performing, bizarrely, at the Odeon Leicester Square as part of something called Podicon.

And we will be doing a special Rest Is History. You can buy the tickets on Ticketmaster. I don't have the link, but if you type Ticketmaster Rest Is History... We'll put it on Twitter. Yeah, we'll put it on Twitter. Link to our advert for this show. We will be talking, won't be talking about history and films. So we haven't really settled

on our list yet. I think there'll be some dispute about which films we want to do, but I know which films I want to do. I want to do Alexander Nevsky. I want to do Birth of a Nation. I'm sure we'll talk about Gladiator. I know you're a big fan of Braveheart, Tom. Yeah, well,

there's also a Russian there's a there's a russian film that that features um the worst bottom ever to appear i think in any film certainly that i've seen yeah um who knew that you were absolutely well it's an absolutely terrifying portrayal of uh life in medieval russia and i suspect that that might feature as well because we're not doing kind of like the best yeah films are we or anything like that we're going to try and find kind of interesting categories odd categories um a a kind of range of familiar films a range of less familiar films and hopefully it'll be good anyway it it's absolute bargain what could be more fun on a sunday i think it's about five o'clock five o'clock sunday afternoon i mean let's face it you're not not going to be doing anything else. So come to this thing, you can see us, and you can laugh at Tom's choice of Bottle-related films.

So, James Bond, we're about to talk about what Ian Fleming would have made of it. Well, first of all, Tom, what did you make of it, deep down? OK, I thought it was too long. That's madness, by the way. I just thought, you know, I kind of drifted off at one point, woke up and they were still shooting each other. And also, OK, so I thought that Rami Malek, who's the villain, I thought was terrible.

Shocking. And the reason for that was I thought he'd been so brilliant as Freddie Mercury. Right, I haven't seen that. In the biopic about Queen. He's really wonderful about that. And he's still basically playing Freddie Mercury, it seemed to me. So I kept waiting for him to start singing We Are The Champions or something.

I thought he was good. I thought he was kind of sinister. I thought he was creepy. OK, but so here's the thing. He is physically deformed. He's Lucifer Safin, is he? That's his name, isn't it? It's a very good name. It's a classic kind of great Bond name name but he's kind of physically deformed as you know in the in the in the episode we did on bond we discussed this how um in flaming always makes his villains physically

deformed three nipples very hairy three nipples no earlobes all that kind of stuff now it's a sign of the times that this has provoked quite a lot of controversy. That it's kind of ableist. Oh, right. That it's casting... It's discriminating against ugly... It's discriminating people who look like sinister Bond villains. Right.

And that this is unacceptable. Yeah. And in a sense, it's a kind of classic example of the kind of headwinds that anyone setting out to make a classic Bond film are now facing. You're not allowed to have grotesque villains. That's interesting, because yes, only yesterday I was writing an article. I wrote an anniversaries piece for BBC History magazine, which began with the words, the Emperor Vitellius was a very fat man. And they said, could you change that? And I said, very greedy.

And I said, well, no, I think he was very fat. And it amuses me. I just wanted to start with a bang. And they were like, hmm. And obviously you're not really, you know, that's sort of slightly seen as sort of, you know, middle-aged men punching down by calling Roman emperors fat. Well, I mean, this it reminds me of uh the discussion we had about 300

yeah where um fblt's the the traitor is a kind of hideous hunchback uh a cripple yeah um and the format of films now generally is that um if someone like that appears in a film and he wants to join a band of brothers, then he will be able to do it and he will probably play some kind of moving, starring role. He will, he'll rescue them. He'll rescue them or something like that. Or he'll bring a message and die heroically or something like that. The thing that's kind of shocking and a little bit,

well, actually very, very true to ancient Greece is that he is as kind of morally depraved as he is physically revolting. Yeah. And that's very true to how the Greeks saw the world. The Greeks absolutely kind of equated physical beauty with moral beauty. Like Ian Fleming.

So Ian Fleming seems to have done the same. Yeah. But clearly, this is something that is treading on all kinds of... setting off all kinds of moral tripwires. Well, not for the makers of the James Bond films, because Rami Malek's character is hideous, but also bad. But I wonder, you know, if they make another one,

whether they will take on board those criticisms. Maybe have a very ugly James Bond and a very good looking villain. Possibly. Yeah, I should look forward to that. Actually, to be fair, Daniel Craig is, I mean, he's not classically handsome, is he? No, he's not.

But James Bond himself isn't really meant to be classically handsome. I mean, I remember reading out in the podcast that strange line, those lines in Moonraker, the novel where Fleming says, you know, he looks not English and he looks something dark and all this sort of stuff. I think, I thought the villain was,

he was a kind of traditional Bond villain, wasn't he? He's got a plan, a slightly undefined plan to kind of kill lots of people. He says, we both eradicate people, we both clean up the world, I just want to do it in a neater way than you um and uh they do that thing they do that thing in the film that now in the last 20 years has become very common christopher nolan does it a lot in his dark knight films where the the villain says to bond we're not so different you and i you know that kind of thing okay so

dominic yes okay so on that topic you you asked me what I thought of it. I also thought that it was, it was like a kind of, it was to Adam West's Batman, what the Dark Knight films became. Yeah, so it is to Roger Moore as Christopher Nolan is to Adam West, as it were. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And not least because the soundtrack is done by the same person who does the, Hans Zimmer

who does the soundtrack for all those Christopher Nolan films so it felt very Christopher Nolan like I thought and there's sort of gritty urban kind of feel to it the washed out colours and stuff and so bearing that in mind going back to

the figure of bond as an embodiment of masculinity yeah in in this film he has a wife is he married to no he's not married but she's clearly a girlfriend which he hasn't he only had a very fleeting girlfriend in the very first couple of films she was called sylvia Trench, I think, and he met her twice, but she wasn't serious. This is the first time he's had a serious, lasting love interest with Madeline. The Proustian Madeline Swan.

But not only did he have a girlfriend, massive spoiler alert coming up, if you haven't already switched on. So Harry, our producer, has not seen the film, and yet he's being forced to listen to this and edit it. And we sort of said to him, stop, you know, try and mute it. He said, I can't.

So he also has a daughter. He does have a daughter. Yeah. And so when he's saving the world, he is basically, he's saving his girlfriend and his daughter. Well, there's that scene where he's running through the base where he's got a doo-doo. Yes, the abandoned toy. A soft toy kind of stuck in his belt or something or in his pocket so is

that basically now is that what a kind of classic Bond figure has to do in a film to get away with all his kind of masculine saving the world a little bit does he have to kind of child stuff toy in the the back of it i think people have been doing that

for about 20 or 30 years and have they been doing it in bond films but not in bond films and that's the sort of and that and that's but that's the incongruity of it in a bond film because of course part of the point of the bond character is that he is liberated from all of those he has not he has yeah nothing from any domestic ties he has his parents are dead he's he floats free of human associations so to give him those associations i mean i think once you've done that you can you can't really do it again i mean in future bond films he can't be you know preparing the sandwiches for children's party or something i mean that would obviously be ludicrous so or going to b&q to get some stuff he can't do any of that so i think that's but he'd get elite service in b&q wouldn't he be

recognized in b&q mr bond your usual plywood yeah exactly um no i think i think i mean this is part of the sort of you know all this talk about toxic masculinity and stuff this is part of the sort of, you know, all this talk about toxic masculinity and stuff. This is kind of playing with that, isn't it? That Bond is, you know, it's the shock when he sees he has a daughter. You know, the ultimate threat to James Bond's mystique. He'll have to, you know, take it to the loo when they go to the cinema or whatever. I think that that's kind of fun fun but they can't do it again i mean as soon as i saw the daughter i thought um he'll have that you know this will not end well for daniel craig's james

bond because it's just that they can't envisage a future with him with the daughter but i mean the the um the the archetype which is obviously a very ancient one, of a man rescuing a woman. Yeah. Which is basically what this film is about at the end of the day. Well, so many Bond films are about, right? I mean, how many of the final kind of climactic confrontations of Bond films are Bond rescuing the girl from the villain's, you know, revenge or whatever?

But again, I mean is is that kind of basic plot something i mean clearly it's again it's it's it's a basic plot that is has to be complicated now in a way that it wasn't say in the 60s it's only marginally complicated though isn't it i mean he rests he goes to the base he's determined to rescue his his girlfriend and his daughter he does rescue them and he does save the world but obviously a tremendous cost to himself i mean that's a as you say it's almost like a mythical story i mean bond and actually i was only thinking about this the other day after we did our podcast bond is a mythical character yeah when future

generations you said what will future what will people in 2050 make of this the sort of more interesting question in a way in a weird way is what will people in the 31st century make of it and they will probably look on bond much as we look on heracles or achilles they'll say well these characters in the sort of these these these punters in the late 20th early 21st century invested this character of tremendous importance they bought things that he wore they modeled themselves on him they knew he wasn't real but they kind of wished that he was you know well they made podcasts about him you mentioned heracles uh heracles uh ends up um on a funeral pyre burning to death. Yes. And the Greeks had two views on what happened next.

The first was that he was claimed by a chariot, taken up to Olympus and basically became immortal. And the second is that he died. Now, massive spoiler clacks are coming up. At the end of this film, James Bond gets hit by a rain of missiles that descend and destroy this breeding ground for the plague that's going to wipe out the world. So the world is saved, but Bond isn't saved.

He dies. Yeah. So what does that mean for the franchise, do you think? I actually don't think it means as much as people think. Previously, what happened with the end of each Bond was they were simply replaced and the franchise continued. There was, on Her Majesty's Secret Service, which we didn't talk about at all last time,

which is the obvious precursor to this film, there are tons of notes to it. And there's kind of homage in this one, isn't there? In the music. And in lines. We have all the time in the world. It's the last line of On Her Majesty's Secret Service when Bond's wife, Tracy, Diana Rigg, is killed. So there is a kind of precedent in that they have put, in 1969,

they pushed the formula, killed the bong girl in the final moments of the film i remember my mum telling me that when she went to see that with my dad uh she cried at the end and lots of people were crying in the cinema when diana riggs character was killed so unexpected to anyone who hadn't read the book um i think uh i mean normally what happens is they don't mention any kind of transition. Obviously, what they're going to do is reboot it. They'll do what they do with Spider-Man or something. They'll start again with a new M.

I mean, that's what I would do, start again with a new M, a new Q, a new Money Benny, new setup, new Bond. There's no need to even refer to the fact that this has happened. Do you think that they might kind of make a virtue of the fact that it was originated in the 50s? And go back and set it in the 50s again? Yeah. I did wonder that, and I think no, because that would make Bond a period piece.

The lasting appeal of Bond is the modernity, right? Is that he has the latest technology, the latest look, the coolest new pop star does the music you know they have they have the sort of stars of the day and cameo roles and things they lose that don't they when they go back to the 50s suddenly then you're freezing but it just felt with this one that they were kind of pushing the the um the potential that exists within the character and and the narrative setup to kind of be squared with the incredibly different mores of of the 21st century that they kind of pushed

it almost to a break i mean literally to a breaking point i mean to the point where they basically had to kill him i agree i agree with you and i kind of wonder where you know where do you go after that well i think the there's a good precedent for that and we've already mentioned it in this podcast which is batman so batman um mid 20th century character um there were various iterations obviously and then christopher and christian bale do the dark knight films which are very dark very gritty the most realistic kind of version of batman there has been and there have been attempts to do Batman since and none of them have really you know with Ben Affleck and stuff and none of them

have really worked because there was a sense that that iteration of the franchise had pushed the concept as far as you could possibly push it and it'd be interesting to see how they I would have said the only way you can do James Bond after this is to do it in a very light way.

To get back to a sense of... Back to Roger Moore. Well, get back to a kind of sense of fun. You know, it's not all... You know, there's a sense in this film that James Bond's not really enjoying himself, isn't there? I mean, he's never enjoying himself in this film. But the problem with that is that you've got Austin Powers and...

I don't think that's a problem. I just don't think that's a problem. I think if you have a very cool star who people want to see you've got austin powers and i don't think that's a problem i just don't think that's a problem i think if you have a very cool star who people want to see uh and they know it's a fun iteration and they and and it's and it's a good light-hearted kind of two hours of entertainment i think people will still want to see it if you make it desirable i think i i can't see that there's anything to be gained from pushing this version of the myth as as it were, into darker and darker territory. So just to return to the question we began with,

you're writing the history of the 2020s. Yeah. Is this a film that would merit a chapter? A chapter? A whole chapter? Or just a paragraph or just a sentence? I think maybe a page. I think maybe a page.

And where I would put it? I probably wouldn't put it in a sort of pandemic section. I put it about... I mean, certainly the thing with Bond and his replacement is really a fun way, would be a fun way of introducing a section about the sort of challenge to the kind of white masculinity and stuff.

Don't you think? Yeah. The new face of MI6 is a black woman. I think that's very much of the moment. And I think the sort of, you know, the sense of we live in an age which is obsessed in many ways with, people say interrogating, I don't want to use the jargon, with sort of tearing down the sort of

the imaginative world that you and I grew up with which was an imaginative world forged in the Second World War and the early Cold War you know, sort of Biggles comics about the Second World War the Dambusters on TV about every two weeks, that kind of thing

and you could see this as the kind of culmination of that this is really just sort of demolishing all of that well it opens it opens with kind of britannia as a great sunken statue that's right i mean she's been toppled britannia has been toppled into the ocean um yes yes absolutely half sunk beneath sand. Yeah. And I think, yes, it sort of ends, there's that sort of, I thought they ended it very well, actually. So Bond is dead. There's the scene in the pub where M, Q, Moneypenny, Bond's replacement, Nomi, I think that's probably it,

are sitting around having a scotch. And he says a few lines from Jack London. And then they say right back to work. But then it cuts to Madeleine Swann and the daughter driving through, you know, some classic Bond landscape. And she says, I'm going to tell you a story about a man called Bond, James Bond. And that kind of, I'm going to tell you a story. I mean, that felt very kind of mythic. You know, Bond is a story so maybe that's maybe that's

where they go into something that is kind of more overtly mythic yeah i think so do you think it's a stretched core bond mythic i mean you're the you deal in myth no every day i think i think i think absolutely yeah completely right um i think that maybe the best way to end this would be for you to uh to read out the... Yeah. It could be talking about Tom Holland of The Rest is History, but it's actually talking about James Bond, and it was written by Jack London in 1916.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time in making history podcasts. And with that, don't forget to get your tickets for the Odeon Leicester Square on Sunday the 14th of November where you will see Tom and I

in person talking about history and films. Very exciting. And we shall see you next time. As they say, the rest is history will return 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 rest is history pod.com