Speaker
Horatio Gould
Appearances over time
8 episodes
Episodes
8
What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East Germany & The Stasi
I Prefer El Alamein’s Early Stuff (with Pierre Novellie) | Monty vs Rommel (Part 3/4)
Italy’s Greatest Weapon Is Surrender | Monty vs Rommel (Part 2/4)
Nazis Are No Match For Knobbly Knees | Monty vs Rommel (Part 1/4)
Cuckolded by Mr Tumble | Claudius (Part 2)
Not All Roman Emperors Are Visible | Claudius (Part 1)
Hanging Out The Blatter it | The History of The World Cup (Part 4/4)
First Port Stanley, Now This?? (with The Upshot!) | The History of The World Cup (Part 3/4)
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Argentine inflation exceeded 560% in 1976, making the economy effectively 'psychedelic' and ungovernable.
As a distinct historical period, the GDR lasted longer than Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the German Empire combined.
FIFA delegate Chuck Blazer rented a $6,000-a-month apartment in Trump Tower solely for his cats.
Sliced bread was invented in 1928, meaning Monty's arrival in North Africa came 14 years after what is proverbially 'the best thing since sliced bread'.
Ancient Britons were already wearing trousers by at least 600 BC, which shocked the Romans who wore skirts and considered trousers barbaric.
Diego Maradona spent a minimum of $15,000 a month calling his parents and siblings, demonstrating his unusually close family ties.
In 1985, Pope John Paul II invited Diego Maradona — who was heavily addicted to cocaine — to the Vatican to promote an anti-drug campaign.
Before meeting the Pope at the Vatican in 1985, Maradona went on an all-night bender and then demanded to use the Pope's bathroom to do a line of cocaine.
Muammar Gaddafi was born in 1942, meaning he was approximately four months old during the Second Battle of El Alamein — and the hosts confirmed he was a Gemini.
Diego Maradona used a fake penis filled with baby urine to pass drug tests during his time at Napoli in the 1980s.
The prosthetic penis Maradona used to fake drug tests ended up in a museum, from which it was later stolen and never recovered.
Montgomery lived until 1976, meaning the WWII general survived into Harold Wilson's second term and the Callaghan government — far outlasting his wartime contemporaries.
After fleeing Italy, Maradona was busted in Argentina with approximately 500 grams of cocaine but received only a minor punishment.
Caligula appointed his disabled, drooling uncle Claudius as consul not out of respect but as a deliberate insult to the Roman Senate.
England player Steve Hodge, who swapped shirts with Maradona after the 1986 Hand of God game, later sold the shirt for approximately £7–9 million.
The North African Desert campaign is the only part of World War II where Britain beats the enemy without American help. The Americans arrive in 1943 and immediately render everything Monty achieved largely irrelevant — which is probably why no one else talks about it.
Monty is the ultimate autistic planner: teetotal, bed at 9:30, big knobbly knees, hates small talk. Rommel is pure ADHD: impulsive, drugs, pints, tail. Their contrasting personalities didn't just shape their commands — they shaped the entire desert war.
Rommel's 7th Panzer Division earned the nickname 'Ghost Division' because it moved through France so fast that nobody — not even German high command — could keep track of where they were. He ignored orders, spotted gaps, and kept going. That's not just Blitzkrieg; that's more Blitzkrieg than Blitzkrieg.
In October 1917, Rommel captured 81 guns and 9,000 Italian prisoners at Caporetto. As the hosts note, this wasn't that hard — Italian military incompetence is basically a constant throughout this story. The real logistical nightmare was figuring out what to do with 9,000 Italians who were immediately hungry, bored, and tired.
At Meteren in October 1914, Monty was shot in the right lung. British forces thought he was dead. A comrade then lay on top of him for hours absorbing sniper fire. He survived. This experience — lying helpless under bodies while the war calamity unfolded around him — is thought to have made Monty obsessively cautious about casualties for the rest of his career.
Mussolini declared war on June 10, 1940, believing France had already fallen and Britain was next — he wanted a seat at the peace table. His grand strategy for North Africa: build a road, ride into Cairo bareback on a white horse like Napoleon. He genuinely didn't understand what a war was.
The North African Desert campaign is the closest World War II ever gets to football: expansive play across a pitch, tactical overloads, breaking lines, beating the offside trap. Monty is the methodical manager; Rommel is the free-wheeling genius. The hosts debate whether it's Cruyff vs Mourinho or Arteta vs Luis Enrique.
Before any major engagement, Monty ran a 100,000-troop exercise called Exercise Tiger to rehearse his tactics. His entire philosophy was simple: only attack when you know you're going to win. That obsession with preparation came directly from his WWI experience of lying in a ditch wondering what could be done differently.
While the British Army ran on regimented chain-of-command bureaucracy, the German military gave individual commanders freedom to exploit chaos on the ground. Rommel was the ultimate expression of this — he yes-anded his way across France, breaking lines, going in behind, and turning improvisation into an art form.
Monty's father became Bishop of Tasmania and moved the family to Australia. His mother Maud beat the children to stop them developing Australian accents — which Fin finds entirely reasonable. Back in London at 13, nicknamed Monkey for mischief, Monty tattooed both forearms to fit in and later hid them in shame.
Surfshark is the show's most loyal sponsor, and the hosts have never really worked out what a VPN is. Horatio claims to actually use it to pretend he's still in Britain while on holiday. Fin wants to use it to fool his wife's Find My Friends. Neither of these are what VPNs do.
Claudius had cash ready the moment Caligula was assassinated — 15,000 sesterces per Praetorian Guard soldier. That kind of liquidity doesn't happen by accident. The hosts argue this single detail all but proves Claudius was complicit in the murder of his own nephew.
In 43 AD, Claudius sent 40,000 soldiers across the Channel to conquer Britain, then personally showed up at the Thames with a herd of war elephants for the final march on Colchester. Eleven tribes surrendered. Colchester — Camulodunum — became Rome's first British capital.
The Romans were genuinely terrified of ancient Britons — not because of their military prowess but because they wore trousers (unprecedented to Romans in skirts), had blue tattoos, and bleached their hair blond. Trousers, it turns out, date back to at least 600 BC.
There's a popular revisionist view that Rommel was 'not really a Nazi' — just a military professional whose heart wasn't in it. Fin disagrees. Rommel oversaw Hitler Youth training, commanded his personal escort battalion, and was a senior Nazi general. Measured against all of human history, he's still one of the most Nazi people who ever lived.
Analysis
What they talk about
- History 58%
- Sports 26%
- Society & Culture 16%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
