Tom Holland | The Spectator columnists & writers

I have done absolutely nothing this past year except pound away at a book. For complicated logistical reasons that are far too boring to go into, I discovered last summer – rather in the manner of a Bank of England economist blindsided by the inflation rate – that I had badly miscalculated how long I had to finish it. A deadline that I had initially thought was February 2023 turned out to be July 2022. As a result, I have done nothing these past 12 months except write about the Romans. I have incinerated the Temple of Jerusalem, destroyed Pompeii, inaugurated the Colosseum and built Hadrian’s Wall. What I have not done, however, is much exercise – and so no sooner had I breasted the tape of my deadline than I was off for a 20-mile walk across London.

The prickly truth: hedgehogs face a struggle to survive

No wild animal is closer to the hearts of the British than the hedgehog. In poll after poll, it has been voted our favourite mammal. This is hardly surprising. Hedgehogs naturally inspire affection. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, the companionable washerwoman created by Beatrix Potter, is only the most celebrated of a whole host of them who trot and snuffle through our national imagination. They are familiar to us in a way that few other wild creatures are. They can be met in fields and gardens, in hedgerows and parks. To see one is to feel the tug of a fascination with the natural world as a whole. In the words of Hugh Warwick, the naturalist who serves hedgehogs as their great contemporary champion: ‘These are precious creatures to be treated with great respect.

The church that’s hosted the Virgin Mary, Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Grant

There is only one place in the world that has played host to both the Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin, and it is in trouble. At St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish church, the beams of the Lady Chapel are rotting. Rebuilt in the 14th century, the present chapel stands on the site of a much older structure. It was here, sometime in the late 12th century, that a monk named Hubert was visited by the Virgin. She was not best pleased; the praises offered to her, she complained, were no longer up to scratch. Hubert hurried to relay this to his fellow monks. All of them, from that time on, made sure to raise ‘a readier praise of her name’. Such was the impact of what remains, to this day, the only recorded appearance of Christ’s mother in the capital.

The anxieties that long ago shadowed Christmas are back

Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own. It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots. Folk memories of Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas — however distorted they may be — remain sufficiently enduring that the Prime Minister, one of life’s natural Charles IIs, must surely have been desperate not to be associated with them.

The history of Thebes is as mysterious as its Sphinx

The Spartans were not the only Greeks to die at Thermopylae. On the fateful final morning of the battle, when Leonidas, knowing that the pass had been sold, ordered the vast majority of the contingents stationed at the Hot Gates to retreat and live to fight another day, two detachments stayed behind to join the 300 in their heroic last stand against Xerxes. Both these detachments came from Boeotia, the fertile plain which stretched directly south of Thermopylae and extended as far as the frontier with Athens. One of these two detachments came from Thespiae, a small but famously cussed city in central Boeotia: 700 hoplites who, alongside the Spartans, fought, died and were lauded as martyrs for Greek liberty. What, though, of the 400 men who constituted the other contingent? Their fate was altogether more contested.

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield, and Tanya Gold

24 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield, and Tanya Gold

24 min listen

It's the 10,000th edition. This week's episode features historian Tom Holland on the Spectator's winning recipe; Douglas Murray on why he loves journalists; Mary Wakefield on coronavirus uncertainty; and Tanya Gold on what it's like to be the magazine's restaurant critic.

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield, and Tanya Gold

24 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield, and Tanya Gold

24 min listen

Sugared with wit: How ‘Mr Spectator’ came to life

The Spectator is a child of the 19th century, and damned proud of it. First published in 1828, the link provided by its 10,000 issues to a long-vanished age of Regency waistlines and Romantic poets is one of the great wonders of journalism. Its success was built upon Victorian foundations, yet it is a peculiarity of the current media landscape that The Spectator, the only current affairs magazine actually to have been published in the 19th century, should in many ways seem the least Victorian of the lot. The New Statesman, Prospect, Standpoint: all have a certain quality of moral earnestness that one could imagine Gladstone admiring. The Spectator, by contrast, seems to breathe the coffee-perfumed air of an earlier age.

The Edition

Could coronavirus hasten the demise of religion?

38 min listen

The Edition

Could coronavirus hasten the demise of religion?

38 min listen

This is an Easter like no other - so what happens to Christianity when Christians can't go to church (1:00)? We also hear reports from the New York frontline (12:20), and discuss just why humour is so important in dark times (19:40).

Revelations about the prophet

In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo put Muhammad on the cover, he did so as the heir to more than 200 years of a peculiarly French brand of anti-clericalism. Just as radicals in the Revolution had desecrated churches and smashed icons, so did cartoonists at France’s most scabrous magazine delight in satirising religion. Although Catholicism was their principal target, they were perfectly happy to ridicule Islam too. If Jesus could be caricatured, then why not Muhammad? Sure enough, one year after the prophet’s first appearance on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, he was portrayed again, this time crouching on all fours and with his genitals bared. The mockery would not cease, so the magazine’s editor vowed, until ‘Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism’.

The way of the cross

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat in another cathedral, Winchester, listening to the bells peal.

Decline and fall | 8 November 2018

For a millennium and a half now, one of the great pleasures of being a commentator on current affairs has been comparing a political crisis to the fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing recently has quite so turbo-charged this perennial trend like the presidency of Donald Trump. The flamboyant egotism, the patent amorality, the porn stars: all seem conjured up from the reign of a peculiarly depraved Caesar. The vague sense that Rome fell because its rulers were decadent — no matter how divorced from historical reality such a myth may be — still lurks in the public imagination. Bill Kristol, one of the most prominent Republicans to have joined the Never Trump movement, summed up the mood with a single dyspeptic tweet: ‘The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive.

Fallen franchise

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing the science it was fictionalising. The story of a theme park populated by resurrected dinosaurs, it offered a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was as close to authentic as could then plausibly be achieved. For the first time, computer-generated imagery was used to portray dinosaurs as scientists had come to envisage them: agile, bird-like, smart.

Children and slaves first

In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that as an explanation. The purposes of heaven were to be traced in the patterns of earthly history. ‘It was not merely as a consequence of human agency that the greater part of the world’s peoples came to be joined under the sole rule of Rome — nor that this should have coincided with the lifetime of Jesus.’ A global faith, Eusebius argued, had been rendered possible by a globalised age. Today, the question of how and why a crucified criminal from an obscure corner of the Roman empire had come to be enshrined, within a bare four centuries, not just as a divine patron of the empire, but as one who had decisively routed all his rivals for the title, toppling gods from their ancient thrones and terminating their priesthoods, is one that — understandably — continues to preoccupy historians.

The photograph that filled me with terror

This time last year, in a review for The Spectator of two books on extraterrestrial life, I mentioned how, as a child, the highlight of the summer holidays was when my cousin Simon came to stay. Our great shared passion was mysteries: not only flying saucers, but everything from the Loch Ness Monster to Atlantis as well. Naturally, ghosts figured high on the list of our obsessions. We knew all the classic tales of hauntings: from a spectre in chains reported by Pliny the Younger to have roamed a house in Athens, to Borley Rectory. Nothing, though, gave us quite as delicious a shudder of dread as a photograph of an Ipswich man sitting in a car, taken back in 1951 by his wife after a visit to her mother’s grave — for there, sitting in the back seat, was her mother.

Don’t forget the Yazidis

As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its timbers had scraped the peak of a mountain range called Sinjar. Water began to pour in. Fortunately, a black serpent, its coils as thick as an arm, moved to plug the breach. The Ark did not sink. Noah, his family, and all the various animals on board survived to repopulate the earth. This story, so familiar, so strange, can be seen illustrated in a shady courtyard that also boasts, just for good measure, the very spot where Adam is claimed to have been fashioned from dust. Lalish, a magical compound of domes, towers and stairways, stands in a valley in Iraqi Kurdistan. To the Yazidis, a religious minority whose population straddles both the Kurdish region of Iraq and, to the south, the plain of Nineveh and the peaks of Sinjar, it is quite simply the holiest place in the world.

The killing God

On 6 July 1535, the severed head of England’s former lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was carried across London Bridge to the gatehouse on the southern bank. There it was parboiled and set on a spike. Another head, that of the bishop and theologian John Fisher, was removed to make way for it, and thrown into the Thames. Both men, rather than accept Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England, had willingly embraced martyrdom at the king’s hands. Both men would end up canonised by the Catholic Church. Amid the violent convulsions of the Reformation, nowhere bore more public witness to the willingness of men to kill and be killed in the cause of God than London Bridge. Time, though, would see the intensity of these religious passions fade.

In praise of a precious poet

Never having experienced anything that I would attribute to a supernatural cause, I am obliged to confess that my prayers have always gone unanswered. But I only have to read George Herbert — rector of a small church near where I grew up, and therefore a poet who has always been particularly precious to me — to regret this: Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, The land of spices; something understood. To read more from our Spectator survey of answered prayers, click here

To earth from heaven

When I was a child, the highlight of the summer holidays was when my cousin Simon came to stay. We shared a common obsession: aliens. Day after fruitless day, we would scan the skies, looking for UFOs. At night, long after we were supposed to have gone to sleep, we would get out our torches and pore over books on extraterrestrial life. These ranged from the sternly scientific — tomes on astronomy or space flight — to paperbacks with altogether more lurid copy. One in particular, filled with vivid images of flying saucers and Area 51, was a focus of our almost superstitious fascination. This was because it contained a picture that —to my deep embarrassment now — we had mutually decided was the scariest we had ever seen.

Diary - 1 September 2016

European unions come and go. Back in 1794, one of the more improbable ones was founded when Corsica joined Britain as an autonomous kingdom under the rule of George III. It didn’t last long, and by 1796, after an ignominious Brexit from the island, the Corsicans once again found themselves under French rule. Today, the episode is chiefly remembered for the injury sustained by one particular officer during the initial British capture of the island: it was during the siege of Calvi that Nelson lost the sight in his right eye. ‘Never mind,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I can see very well with the other.’ Naturally, as an appalling hypochondriac myself, I had always wanted to visit the site of this magnificent display of sangfroid — and so last week, during a visit to Corsica, I took my chance.

Pitch perfect | 21 July 2016

One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect sky’. Hotten’s prose, simultaneously spare and lyrical, conjures up the scene as magically as Edward Thomas’s poem evokes Adlestrop. What happened to the people who played with him on that day, Hotten wonders. ‘Have they had good lives since then? I hope so. Nothing ties us except that game, but I doubt that anyone who played has forgotten it.’ The reflection is one that cuts to the heart of why people who play cricket regularly over the course of their lives should so love and treasure it.

The perfect religion for Guardian readers (plus some other neglected belief systems)

Exciting news from the world of philosophy! Next year will see the 20th anniversary of the New Stoa, an online community of ‘all those who are Stoics and who wish to be known by the commitment they have made’. Stoicism, the philosophy of choice for sanctimonious Roman billionaires, is evidently making a comeback. Its appeal, to an age obsessed equally by smartphones and virtue signalling, is no great mystery, I suppose. Seneca, who served as Nero’s tutor and whose manipulation of the overseas currency markets may well have precipitated Boudicca’s revolt, was a Stoic. ‘Though finding fault with the rich, he acquired a fortune of 300,000,000 sesterces,’ wrote the historian Dio Cassius; ‘and though he censured the extravagances of others, he had 500 tables of citrus wood with legs of ivory, all identically alike.

Would you believe it? A selection of ancient faiths ripe for revival

Of gods and men

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first on earth and then in the heavens, and history began. Outside Egypt itself, the British Museum is as good a place as any to trace their evolution: how, for millennia, temples were raised in their honour, and rituals performed.

Diary - 24 September 2015

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared to plenty of people over the past few months — a geography teacher, Michael Foot, Brian from the Monty Python film — but my favourite comparison was to a horse. Steve Fielding, professor of politics at Nottingham, declared Corbyn’s election ‘an act of political stupidity unparalleled since Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate’. As someone with a book just published on Rome’s first imperial dynasty, I was doubly thrilled. First, Professor Fielding had confirmed the conviction in which I had written my history of the first Caesars: that two millennia on, the West’s primal examples of political excess continue to instruct and appal. Secondly, though, by repeating the widely believed story that Caligula had made his horse a senator, Professor Fielding was also demonstrating just how important control of the narrative has always been for leaders.

The glory that was Greece

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so Xenophon suggested, should be streamlined and enhanced; simultaneously, the city should invest in increasing its commercial and housing stock. The economy, boosted by these measures, would also benefit from encouraging foreign investment. ‘Imports and exports, sales, rents and customs’: all would then surely flourish. Traditionally, the reputation of classical Greece among economists has tended to be almost as low as that of the modern Greek finance ministry.

Darius III: Alexander’s stooge

In 1891, George Nathaniel Curzon, ‘the very superior person’ of the mocking Balliol rhyme, and future viceroy of India, arrived at Persepolis. Torched in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, it had once been the nerve-centre of an empire that stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. For Curzon, whose tour of Iran had already taken him all over the country, the ruins of the great palace were a particular highlight. The Persia of the Achaemenids, the ruling dynasty of the ancient empire, was, so he declared, ‘immeasurably superior to medieval Persia in its attributes and even now more respectable in its ruins’. Coming from a man who was himself no slouch at imperial pomp, this was high praise indeed. It was not merely as a prototype of the British Raj, though, that ancient Persia could be admired.

Tom Holland’s diary: Fighting jihadism with Mohammed, and bowling the Crown Prince of Udaipur

As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival where you are most likely to be greeted by an elephant. The life of a writer is rarely glamorous, but for one week in January — should an invitation to Jaipur be forthcoming — it decidedly is. The festival is to India what a Richard Curtis film is to London: a fusion of all the fondest stereotypes that foreigners have of a place. The talks, which run the gamut from the Mahabharata to the future of the novel, are pure literary masala. The parties are visions of perfumed candles, shimmering saris and maharajas’ palaces. The last time I was in Jaipur, there was even a cricket match. Needless to say, we were greeted at the ground by dancing girls, our captain rode out to the toss on a camel, and I got to bowl the Crown Prince of Udaipur.

Tom Holland’s diary: Alex Salmond is the Scottish referendum’s answer to Shane Warne

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union" startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]I feel a bit about the Scottish referendum as I did about the 2005 Ashes series. In both cases, those of us in the know were gripped with a nervous tension right from the very beginning. Shane Warne, Alex Salmond: the same smirk, the girth, the same potentially lethal form. That whole summer of 2005 I was on the rack, following every convulsive twist and turn, hoping against hope that England would manage to cling on to a precarious lead until stumps were drawn on the final day of the series. Tracking the Scottish referendum has been a similarly nerve-jangling experience.

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