Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillette.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Quillette.com and becoming a paid subscriber. This subscription will also

give you access to all our articles and early access to Quillette social events. And today, I am going

to break my usual rule against interviewing other podcasters, because it's Christmas, and you get

to break rules on Christmas. And also because this is pretty much

my favorite podcaster in the whole wide world. And so getting the chance to talk to him is

kind of my Yuletide present to myself, and to you, of course. So if you're a regular listener,

you're probably a fan of history, because I cover a lot of it on a Quillette podcast. And for many years,

the standard by which others are judged in the historical podcasting genre has been Mike Duncan's

epic History of Rome podcast and his equally excellent Revolutions podcast. But as Yoda once said,

there is another, and he is my guest today, David Crowther,

creator of the History of England podcast, which is about what it says on the tin, basically.

For more than a decade, David has systematically been taking his listeners through the history

of England, with detailed forays into the history of Scotland, Ireland, and,

yes, even Wales, along the way, from the age of the venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxons, up into

the mid-17th century, which is where his narrative now sits after 421 episodes comprising

2.5 million words. And the guy is not going to stop, I learned in the interview

you're about to hear, till he gets to the year 1913, which should take another 400 episodes or so.

But my specific pretext, I mean rationale, for getting David on the podcast this week,

is that it's Christmas, which, as we all know, is always under attack,

a.k.a. the Endless War on Christmas. But the War on Christmas we're going to be talking about

...