Hello and

this is a show for instance kitchen and this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating

and this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is an author, historian and presenter.

Tom Holland, welcome to Chigonometry.

Thank you very much for having me.

It is great to have you here.

We're delighted that you've come, but for anyone who doesn't know, you just give us a little overview of who are you,

how are you where you are, what is the journey that brings you to this chair sitting here on the podcast and we know you don't

listen to podcast so it's it must be a very special experience. Yeah yeah it's a journey

of discovery for me. Yes. I'm a historian. I focus very much on antiquity, early Middle Ages, and that might seem to make me wildly unsuitable for a topical podcast, but the degree that I have anything topical to say,

it's because I'm interested in the way that things that happened in the deep past

continue to reverberate into the present.

So my most recent book, Dominion,

is a book in which I look at Christianity

as the most radical and transformative product of the Roman Empire and I think that the

trace elements of that revolution continue to shape the way that we think and behave today.

And that's why we're so delighted to have you on the show because whenever we spoke into historians,

you know, the idea that history operates and cycles, it's obviously not a new thing it's sort of a

dogma almost and it does seem like the current moment it's not the first time these

sort of things have happened so where are we on the spiral of history, Tom?

Well that's a huge question to kick off with. That's what we've got an hour.

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