Tom Holland

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable.

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon—his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic—with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.

In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two venerable empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on and one had vanished forever, while the other seemed almost finished....

Make room Herodotus, stand down Bede, pipe down Pepys...there’s a new history book in town....

The definitive history of Rome’s golden age—an ultimate superpower at the pinnacle of its greatness The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most...

Famed nineteenth-century poet and rake Lord Byron travels to Greece and becomes the world’s most formidable vampire—entering a dark, intoxicating world of ancient arts and scorching excesses of evil—in this offbeat book by the author of Slave of My Thirst. Traveling in the mountains of...

The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world....

La storia di Roma comincia con uno stupro: è dalla violenza di Marte, dio della guerra, su una giovane vestale, che nascono Romolo e...

L'inimicizia, il sospetto, la rivalità tra Occidente e Oriente sono argomenti antichi, se si pensa che è proprio per indagare le sotterranee radici...

In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For 70 years, victory had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire....

Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness....

A “marvelous” (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular...

Myth meets history in a blockbuster retelling of the Persian Wars.

The magic of mythology meets the grit of history in a blazing blockbuster retelling of the Persian Wars from award-winning author Tom Holland. I come to tell you a story. A story unlike any that has been told before. The Trojan War is ancient history. The gods of Olympus are silent and have not...

Tom Holland gives a dazzling portrait of Rome's first imperial dynasty. Dynasty traces the full astonishing story of its rule of the world: both the brilliance of its allure, and the blood-steeped shadows cast by its crimes.

The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world.

This time Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook bring you an alphabetical miscellany, taking on some of history’s best and most bizarre moments.