Tom Holland

Thomas Holland (born 5 January 1968) is an English author and popular historian who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history, and the origins of Islam.

He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presented the radio series Making History.

He co-hosts The Rest is History podcast.

Holland was born in Oxfordshire and brought up in the village of Broad Chalke near Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, the elder of two sons.

His younger brother James Holland is also an author whose focus is World War II.

He has said that his two passions as a child were dinosaurs and ancient civilizations: "I had the classic small boy's fascination with dinosaurs – because they're glamorous, dangerous and extinct – and essentially the appeal of the empires of antiquity is much the same. There's a splendour and a terror about them that appealed to me – and that kind of emotional attachment is something that stays with you."

Holland attended Chafyn Grove preparatory school and the independent Canford School in Dorset.

He then went on to Queens' College, Cambridge, graduating with a 'Double First' (first-class honours in both parts I and II of the course of study in the English Tripos).

He began working on a doctoral dissertation on Lord Byron, at Oxford University, but soon quit after deciding that he was "fed up with universities and fed up with being poor" and instead began working.

Holland's first books were Gothic horror novels about vampires, set in various time periods throughout history.

His first novel, The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron (1995), drew on his knowledge of Lord Byron from his university studies and recast the 19th-century poet as a vampire.

It was re-titled Lord of the Dead: The Secret History of Byron for the 1996 U.S. release.

The Los Angeles Times called it "a good vampire yarn—elevated and elegant enough to make you feel you needn't conceal it behind the dust jacket of some self-help work, yet happily gory and perilous" although they felt "the newly plowed plot ground is sometimes hurried through as if to get to the scholarly stuff, where the author feels perhaps on more solid ground."

Its sequel, Supping with Panthers, was published in 1996 (it was also re-titled for the U.S. release, to Slave of My Thirst).

Holland stayed with the supernatural horror genre for his next few books, continuing to use his knowledge of ancient cultures and settings.

In Attis (1996), he took historical figures from the ancient Roman Republic like Pompey and the poet Catullus and put them in a modern setting among a string of brutal murders.

He set 1997's Deliver Us From Evil in 17th-century England, with a man named Faustus leading an army of the undead.

1999's Sleeper in the Sands is set in Egypt, starting with the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and travelling backward in time as a deadly secret is unveiled.

Holland's last novel to date departed from the supernatural genre.

The Bone Hunter (1999) is a thriller, set in the United States, about the rivalry between two 19th-century paleontologists around whom people begin dying.

While doing research for The Bone Hunter, Holland read From Alexander to Actium by historian Peter Green and his childhood passion for ancient history and civilisations was reignited.

"All my old fascination with antiquity just went Whoosh! up again. From that moment I started re-immersing myself in that world. I had a sense that antiquity was almost like a science fiction world, that it was utterly remote and yet eerily like our own. I was doing vampire books at the time and it never crossed my mind to write history–but I was finding that my real interests were welling up, and the vampire books were really historical novels, and that I was much less interested in the fiction than in the research."

He gave up writing fiction and turned to writing history.

His first book of history, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, was published in 2003 and garnered positive reviews.

It was called "gripping and hugely entertaining" by The Sunday Times, "informative, balanced and accessible" by BookPage, and "a model of exactly how a popular history of the classical world should be written" by The Guardian.

Rubicon won the 2004 Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of non-fiction of historical content.

Persian Fire (2005) is an account of the 5th-century B.C. Greco-Persian Wars.

It was reviewed positively by Paul Cartledge, a professor of Greek history at Cambridge University, for The Independent: "If Persian Fire does not win the Samuel Johnson Prize, there is no justice in this world."

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, historian Dominic Sandbrook called it "riveting" and praised the "enormous strengths" of the author.

It won the Anglo-Hellenic League's 2006 Runciman Award.

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom (2008) examines the two centuries either side of the seminal year 1000 A.D., and how Western Europe ascended out of the Dark Ages, to become a leading world civilization once again.

Noel Malcolm reviewed it for The Daily Telegraph and called it "a tremendously good read", but criticised the lack of detail about historical evidence and Holland's "elevated" style of prose.

Christina Hardyment, reviewing it for The Independent, praised Holland's writing style, saying he "excels at narration, never jogging when he can gallop ... His highly individual road map to the hitherto 'dark ages' is written with forceful – and convincing – panache."

Holland's book on the rise of Islam, In the Shadow of the Sword (2012), was called "a work of impressive sensitivity and scholarship" by The Daily Telegraph and "a book of extraordinary richness ... For Tom Holland has an enviable gift for summoning up the colour, the individuals and animation of the past, without sacrificing factual integrity" by The Independent.

But it was criticised by historian Glen Bowersock in The Guardian as being written in "a swashbuckling style that aims more to unsettle his readers than to instruct them ... irresponsible and unreliable".

Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar (2015) covers the reigns of the five emperors of Rome's Julio-Claudian dynasty, from Augustus to Nero.

Classics professor Emily Wilson, reviewing it for The Guardian, was critical of the "overblown style" and narrative's lurid details, saying, "this is ancient Rome for the age of Donald Trump".

But in his review for The Observer, Nick Cohen wrote "Among the many virtues of Tom Holland's terrific history is that he does not shrink from seeing the Roman emperors for what they were: 'the west's primal examples of tyranny'."

Holland next wrote two short historical biographies.

The first, Athelstan: The Making of England (2016), is part of the 'Penguin Monarchs' series and covers the life of Æthelstan, the 10th-century ruler regarded as the first king of England.