This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everybody. I am here with Tom Holland. Tom Holland is a novelist, an author,

historical author. He has written several books, and his latest book called Dominion

looks at the intellectual impact and moral impact of Christianity

on the West and how it shaped the way the West saw itself and how it saw morality and its own

identity.

I finished reading the book a few weeks ago and I was very impressed.

Several people kept pointing me towards the book and said, you have to read Dominion,

you have to read Dominion because it fell within this strange post-secular, or I would say,

people who are questioning the way that secular society has viewed itself in the past few

years. And so it felt like his book fell right into there. And so I'm really excited to have

this discussion with him and to explore a little bit about his idea of what this means for

the world today. And so Tom, thank you for accepting to do this. I thought maybe I could start,

maybe you can tell me a little bit just to start for people who don't know about you, what the impetus for writing this book, particular book was.

Well, thanks very much for having me.

I guess this is a book that had been kind of brewing in my mind for maybe a couple of decades,

really.

So right at the end of the 1990s,

I began writing history aimed at a popular market

set in the period that I'm particularly interested in,

which is the classical Roman in particular. So I wrote a book about the which is the classical, Roman in particular.

So I wrote a book about the fall of the Rome Republic, and then I wrote a book about the

the Greco-Persian Wars, so marathon, Thermopylae, Alamis, and so on. And these had always been the

...