Hello, this is Sam Leith. I'm Fred I'm still away, but just for the meantime, here's an old episode from the archives.

It's Tom Holland from 2019 talking about his marvellous book, Dominion.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined in the run-up to Christmas by the historian Tom Holland, whose new book is called Dominion.

The Making of the Western Mind, I think is the subtitle.

It is?

Yes.

And it's a book about the history of Christianity and its effect on the whole of Western culture.

So a modest project.

Yes, and the fact that it's called the making of the Western Mind and the fact that there's barely a hint on the cover that it's actually about Christianity kind of

points you to the way in which Christian influence, particularly in Britain perhaps, but generally

across the West, has become quite occluded. It's something that the kind of people who publish

beautiful history books tend not to be entirely comfortable with. But the thesis of the book

essentially is that despite that,

if the West is a goldfish bowl and we're the goldfish, then the waters that we swim in essentially

a Christian, even though we may not appreciate it. And in fact, shortly after I finished the book,

a kind of even better metaphor hit me, which was prompted by watching Chernobyl,

the drama series that I'm sure some of your listeners may have watched.

And in that series, there was a scene where two of the main characters are looking at the radioactivity

leaking from the reactor.

And you can literally see it because the air is being ionized.

But of course, the impact of Chernobyl is experienced in Kiev and Scandinavia and Cumbrian

hill farms by people who don't see the radioactivity but are nevertheless breathing it in

...