Why I Like Tom Holland

Tom Holland

While I was in Wellington at the end of last year, I bought a copy of Persian Fire by Tom Holland. I knew I’d like it, as I’ve liked each of his previous books – sure enough, it proved ideal holiday reading: exciting, dramatic, well-researched and elegantly phrased.

Tom Holland (1968- )


1. Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. 2003. Abacus. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2006.
2. Holland, Tom. Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. 2005. Abacus. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006.
3. Holland, Tom. Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008.
4. Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. 2012. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2012.

I Claudius (1976)

Holland, as I understand it, began as a fiction writer (Attis (1995), The Bonehunter (2001), etc. etc.) then branched into popular history with his best-selling book Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. For a long time I resisted reading this book. Talk about a hackneyed subject! As well as all the books, there have even been numerous television series about the period! I Claudius, Rome: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian, it’s all been done.

Rome (2005-7)

But then, as I started to read, I began to realise why this one stood out from the ruck.

For a start Holland is clearly very well grounded in classics: he’s no journalistic opportunist, and he keeps up with the latest research, both historical and archaeological.

Above all, though, he’s an expert storyteller. I know that that sounds almost like an insult to most historians: it’s analytical ability and archive-hunting they prize, not the ability to turn a rattling good yarn.

But then, the art of the narrative historian is neither as easy nor as intellectually negligible as it may seem. Telling the story in a new way can bring out new connections and encourage a new overview. Nor should the art of bringing to life some period in the past ever be disprized as an objective. Holland is expert at assembling telling details which transform one’s understanding of some shopworn subject.

We know some things so well, or think that we know them so well, that we’ve stopped looking at them clearly. Persian Fire, for example, works mainly as a commentary on and (at times) paraphrase of Herodotus. I’ve read Herodotus many times, in various different translations, with varying degrees of annotation and commentary (Holland himself has just published his own translation, in fact).

Herodotus [Hēródotos] (c.484-c.425 BC)


1. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Ed. A. R. Burn. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
2. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Rev. John Marincola. 1996. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
3. Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007.
4. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Tom Holland. 2013. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2014.
5. de Selincourt, Aubrey. The World of Herodotus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962.

300 (2006)

I literally had no idea that so much remained to be said on the subject! How complex and nuanced a discussion Holland could make of each of the three major battles, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea (now familiar to filmgoers in somewhat caricatured form – though not so much as one might think - through Frank Miller’s big-screen epics 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014))

300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

What of his other books? Well, Millennium was thought-provoking but (I felt) a little tendentious in its attempt to discuss the long and complex story of the growth of the Christian Church at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire through a few key figures and occurrences. Interesting, but not finally entirely convincing.

In the Shadow of the Sword, by contrast, would be my pick for Holland’s masterpiece (to date, at any rate). It’s quite simply one of the most illuminating works of popular historiography I’ve ever read.

The initial contention, that we know far less about the life of Muhammad and the early days of Islam than we once thought we did, is surprising enough to anyone reasonably well read in the field. But Holland’s reconstruction of the intellectual world of the Middle East at the time of the Hegira was – to me, at least – completely new. I didn’t know so much could be known about a period so remote from us. And the painstaking work of recent scholars, admirably condensed by Holland into a simple and comprehensible narrative, results in a whole new understanding of the history of one of the world’s great religions.

I don’t feel this book has received anything like the notice it deserves. It will not “explain” recent events in the Middle East to you, or even feed into our simplistic notions of “East” and “West” – the unsubtle Orientalism that undermines most of our thinking about the region. But it will remind you of just why disinterested scholarship is valuable.

Holland is not an Orientalist – not is he an Academic. He’s just a very clever and empathetic person with a gift for retelling the past and an insatiable appetite for information. He’s the closest thing to an Edward Gibbon (in my humble opinion) the modern age has produced. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Tom Holland: In the Shadow of the Sword (2012)

War Nerd

Have you ever heard of General Butt Naked of Liberia? It sounds rather like the punchline of a joke, but if so, it's a pretty grim one. Apparently, to quote from Gary Brecher's new book of collected columns from the online journal eXile ("Mankind's Only Alternative"), War Nerd: "at the age of 11 he had a telephone call from the devil who demanded nudity on the battlefield, acts of indecency and regular human sacrifices to ensure his protection."

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. [104]

"We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal," the general summed up, in a recent press conference in front of the world's assembled media.

Is this stuff for real? Apparently it is. A quick Google search reveals a Wikipedia article about one Joshua Blahyi (aka "General Butt Naked"). He's repented now, though, after killing approximately 20,000 people during his rampages.

In June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher.

Well, that is reassuring. A bit like George Bush Jr. giving up being an alcoholic loser and family ne'er-do-well and deciding to enter politics instead.

War Nerd, sent to me from Canada by my friend John Dolan, is full of such fascinating anecdotes from ancient and modern history. Its author makes no secret of the fact that he gets off on the whole subject of war, and considers virtually any form of violent and excessive human behaviour preferable to sitting in rush-hour traffic in downtown Fresno, where he works as a downtrodden data-entry clerk.

His reflections on the details of human conflict over the ages are, admittedly, disreputably fascinating, but I guess what interested me most about the book as a whole was how difficult it was to dispute the basic tenets of this war-ophile.

Earlier this year I had a go at reading Robert Fisk's monumental tome The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It was a library book, unfortunately, which meant that I had to read ever faster and faster, hundreds and hundreds of pages of massacres, betrayals, genocides, bombings, burnings etc. until the whole gallimaufry began to spin around my head. Finally it had to go back, all possibilities of renewal exhausted, with a good 400 or so pages to go.

I still haven't given up on it. Bronwyn's bought me my very own copy now, so I will adventure down that intrepid path again one of these days when I'm feeling mentally strong, but I guess my point is that Fisk's tome would appear to confirm the view that Brecher is the one who's on the straight and narrow - it's the rest of us with our idealistic notions of the universal power of peace and fair play who are out of step.

And I don't mean to imply, either, that Brecher's book is somehow "justified" by this comparison with Fisk's more sober-sided, serious trawl through contemporary events. I guess my problem with Fisk (and John Pilger, and various other noble-minded crusaders for truth and justice) is that their position gets increasingly paradoxical as they go along, and yet they never actually go back to square one and examine their own basic postulates about politics and human nature.

The trouble with reading a book by Pilger or Fisk is that they first describe, in grim detail, a whole series of appalling injustices, and then vaguely imply that it should be somehow "set right." Set right by whom? What is the norm in human affairs: Assyrian Kings decapitating their foes, Aztecs tearing out human hearts, Spanish Conquistadors working their Indian slaves to death - or tea parties in Mayfair and Manhattan?

Personally (of course) I'd rather be at the tea party, but I soon as I start to dig a little (what we old-fashioned humanists used to call "thinking"), the motives of the waiting staff begin to present themselves as emblematic of an essentially exploitative top-heavy rewards system. Who cleans up the tables after the tea is drunk? Who carries off the trash? Where does that trash end up? Who lives next to (or on top of) the rubbish-dump? And so on.

Mind you, I certainly respect Fisk and Pilger's moral indignation, but I'd rather they did a more grass-roots, Thoreau-style analysis of their own being-in-the-world. Who folds their sheets? Pays their expense accounts? Why do their books get published and distributed? Because they have the end result of supporting the status quo by implying that wars and genocides are occasional, aberrant - though still distressingly frequent - exceptions to the normal run of affairs in late Capitalist society, rather than "politics continued by other means" (von Clausewitz)?

Brecher's a kind of a humourist, I suppose. At least he certainly writes amusingly. And yet he dares to ask these difficult questions and follows through on the answers. He admits that he'd love to be a warlord, that he sees nothing "irrational" in low-profile, grass-roots guerilla wars. It's funny, yeah, but it's also food for thought in a way that Messrs Chomsky, Fisk and Pilger aren't. They fall back on invoking old-fashioned codes of decency, when the world they describe clearly no longer has the remotest use for such bourgeois scruples.

I'd prefer to live in their world than Brecher's, but the picture he paints makes disconcertingly better sense. And, you know, his analysis of the likes of General Butt Naked (whom it 's hard to imagine even accommodating in most conceptual universes) rings bitterly, horribly true:

The sad part is, I can imagine my folks going to see the bastard preach and getting all sentimental when he starts talking about how the Devil captured him at age eleven ... General Naked may be preaching the Gospel now, but that's the kind of job-change psychos like him can do without breaking a sweat. and they can go back to the old psycho-killer job just as quick when the time's right. [105]

In a world where you can still meet people who feel indignant at the "persecution" of that poor old man General Pinochet, when he was finally arrested in Spain and asked politely to attend a non-binding tribunal to inquire into certain crimes against humanity which had been alleged against him; where immaculately-suited, well-fed media commentators seem genuinely unable to explain why Robert Mugabe doesn't simply renounce the Presidency of Zimbabwe, crying out: "Lord, I done wrong!" under the withering hail of "international opinion," I think it might finally be time to get just a little real.

I'm appalled by the brutal world that Brecher paints, but I'm increasingly unable to pretend that he's making it up as he goes along. Give him a listen. And after you've stopped laughing at all those witty asides, you might do worse than start to think about what he's actually saying.