Speaker
Tom Holland
Appearances over time
6 episodes
Episodes
6
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Nelson Mandela was kept in prison for 27 years before his release on 11 February 1990.
The Wilhelmus is the oldest song in the world to have become a national anthem, with its melody and lyrics dating from 1568–1572.
Tom Holland says Janet Jackson is one of 5 people most integral to his career — her music got him dancing, which led to Billy Elliot and Spider-Man.
Franklin spent approximately a third of his life in Britain, living for 16 years between 1757 and 1775 in a house just off what is now Trafalgar Square in London.
Brazil has won the FIFA World Cup a record five times, and the 1970 team featuring Pelé is widely regarded as the greatest national side of all time.
When Mandela walked free from prison in 1990, he was 71 years old, yet emerged determined to pursue reconciliation rather than revenge.
The Dutch Revolt precipitated an 80-year war between Dutch rebels and the Spanish Empire, making it one of the longest sustained independence struggles in European history.
Franklin is the only person to sign all four foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty with France, the Peace Treaty with Britain, and the Constitution.
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Franklin was 81 years old — the oldest delegate by 15 years and twice the average age of attendees.
The Dutch Republic was by far the richest state per capita on the planet in the 17th century, despite its small size.
Tom Holland performed Billy Elliot on the West End from age 11 to 13, calling it a formative and riotous experience.
Four kids shared the Billy Elliot role simultaneously, rotating performances and standing by in case of injury.
Over the course of his life, Franklin is estimated to have sent or received approximately 15,000 letters, making him a natural choice to organise the infant American postal system.
In the Dutch Republic, 60% of the population in Holland lived in cities — an extraordinary urbanisation rate for the period.
Enoch Sontonga scribbled down the melody and words of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika on a scrap of paper in 1897, a composition that would become one of history's most resonant national anthems.
The Dutch Revolt began with ragtag Protestant pirates taking on the most powerful empire in the world, and ended with a state that invented modern capitalism, stock markets, and religious tolerance. The Dutch Republic was per capita the richest country on the planet in the 17th century.
The Dutch national anthem's first verse has its hero — William the Silent, the George Washington of Dutch independence — pledging lifelong loyalty to the King of Spain, the very monarch he was fighting. It's the strangest opening verse of any national anthem on earth.
William of Nassau was German-born, raised Lutheran, became a Catholic to inherit vast wealth, served loyally as a Spanish royal governor — and then became the founding father of an anti-Spanish, Calvinist, bourgeois republic. He only converted to Calvinism in 1573, after the anthem that bears his name was already written.
The 17 provinces of the Low Countries had around 700 different legal codes, multiple languages, and fierce civic independence going back centuries. This fragmentation, combined with a fiercely Calvinist grassroots Reformation, created the tinder for the most consequential revolt in European history.
The melody of the Wilhelmus originated at the 1568 siege of Chartres — a Catholic garrison's victory over a Protestant attack. The Calvinist rebels then appropriated it as their own anthem, just as they appropriated Catholic churches for Calvinist worship. A Protestant song with a Catholic melody: the perfect emblem of Dutch compromise.
The Dutch Revolt created a template for revolution: replacing an imperial monarchy with a federal republic. Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson all knew this story and drew inspiration from it — and were equally haunted by the way the Dutch Republic gradually mutated from a republic back toward monarchy.
The Dutch Republic's culture of unofficial religious tolerance — turning a blind eye to Catholics, Quakers, Jews, and Muslims — made Amsterdam one of the great centres of Jewish life in the 17th century. It became home to Spinoza, who would go on to question the very value of religion itself and launch the radical Enlightenment.
In July 1581, the Dutch rebels issued the Act of Abjuration, formally removing Philip II from all official documents, coins, and seals. Tom Holland draws a direct line from this moment to the American Declaration of Independence — the same process of loyal subjects rebranding their king as a tyrant.
After failing to defeat the Spanish militarily, William the Silent had his Low Countries properties confiscated, his eldest son seized as a hostage and taken to Spain, and was declared an outlaw. Rather than submit, he mortgaged all his remaining estates and funnelled the proceeds into financing the resistance.
The Wilhelmus was officially banned during the French Revolutionary-era Batavian Republic and Napoleon's rule. It only became the official Dutch national anthem in 1932 — and found its true power when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, with its defiant verse about resisting tyranny becoming a rallying cry for the Dutch resistance.
On 1 April 1572, the Protestant pirate Sea Beggars sailed into the strategically vital port of Brill and found it completely empty — the garrison had gone fishing. They seized it, sacked the Catholic churches, and from this one accidental foothold, the Dutch revolt came roaring back from the brink of total defeat.
Brazil wasn't just a slave society — it was the slave society of the New World. Nearly half of all Africans transported across the Atlantic ended up there, and Brazil was the last Western Hemisphere country to abolish slavery in 1888. Today at least 60% of Brazilians are descended from enslaved Africans.
If you were an enslaved African in the 19th century, where you ended up determined how long you lived. In the United States, enslaved people died on average at 35. In Brazil, at 25. The violence was more extreme, the abolitionist movement almost nonexistent, and slave revolts far more frequent.
Before leaving Brazil for Portugal, King João VI pulled aside his 22-year-old son Pedro and said: if Brazil breaks away, let it be by your hand rather than an adventurer's. A king of Portugal was essentially coaching his heir to lead the revolution against Portugal.
While out hunting in Chantilly with King Henry II of France, William of Orange inadvertently learned that Philip II of Spain and Henry II had agreed a joint policy of full-scale extermination of Protestants — beginning with the Low Countries. William kept a poker face and told no one, earning him the name 'the Silent'.
Analysis
What they talk about
- History 57%
- Arts 11%
- Sports 9%
- Society & Culture 9%
- Religion & Spirituality 4%
- Business 4%
- Health & Fitness 2%
- Education 2%
- Government 2%
Connections
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