Tom Holland

speaker

195 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 1 Jul

Tom Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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On the Media · The Rest Is History · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

I would say that he is... voice-verified

I mean, as hostile and then as dangerous an enemy as the British Empire has ever faced. voice-verified

Thomas Jefferson. voice-verified

Yes. voice-verified

And yet he is passionately devoted to ideals of liberty that he traces back ultimately to the Saxons when they lived in Germany in the Roman period before they kind of crossed to Britain. voice-verified

And he wanted to have on the United States seal, he wanted to have Hengist and Horsa. voice-verified

the primordial ancestors of the Angles and the Saxons when they settle in Britain. voice-verified

And he sees these kind of ancient ideals of liberty as being betrayed by the Hanoverian regime as he would frame it in the 18th century. voice-verified

And that's kind of one way in which that mutates. voice-verified

But another figure who I think kind of represents a possible way in which Britain and America could have stayed together is Benjamin Franklin. voice-verified

who is at least as British a figure as he is American, and who right up to the Boston Tea Party is kind of saying this is a terrible mistake. voice-verified

Can we not have a form of accommodation? voice-verified

Well, I think, I mean, one of the differences between, say, the Irish War of Independence and the American War of Independence is that in the Irish War of Independence, the rebels are looking to draw on ideas and myths and slogans that come from specifically Irish history rather than British history. voice-verified

Whereas in the American War of Independence, all the slogans are coming from British language, British vocabulary. voice-verified

Ironically. voice-verified

And in that mythology, in that vocabulary, the words like liberty and freedom are fundamental. voice-verified

And it is English liberties that are being defended against the Redcoats in Massachusetts when the war kind of goes hot. voice-verified

And the British also have massive slave holdings in the Caribbean. voice-verified

And it is a growing problem, I think, for the slaveholders that this is rubbing up against all kinds of ideological concerns and anxieties within the metropolis, within Britain. voice-verified

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