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I'm here with Tom Holland. Tom, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm a huge fan of your work. I have known about your books for some years, but I recently discovered

your podcast, which you do with Dominic Sandbrook, fellow historian, which is fantastic.

The rest is history. I am working my way through Dominion, which is fantastic. And this

came out a few years ago, but I'm well into it. And it's also great as an audiobook,

which people should know. Well, Sam, if I could just say, also, I'm just in the process of

recording it myself. Oh, nice. I've just been doing that today. So I've just come back from the

recording studio. So don't get the audiobook. Wait for Tom to report it. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So yeah,

I mean, I don't know if you find that as painful a process as I do, but it's surprisingly hard.

I'm finding it very painful. Yeah. Very painful indeed. I've actually had to rewrite lines that I

couldn't get through. I'd inadvertently written tongue twisters for myself. And after 20 takes in front of an ashen phase producer, I literally have to change the language

so that I can neurologically accomplish the task.

You've written about ancient Rome, Christianity, as I said, in Dominion, which we'll focus on.

But you've also covered the origins of Islam and the problem of

jihadism in the West. I just discovered as late as last night the short documentary you did

on ISIS, the Islamic State, which was quite something to revisit. It's amazing how the memory

of the extremity of that horror has faded

for even people who have focused on it at the time. It was just such a ghastly distillation

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