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The Rest Is History Podcast Transcripts

Goalhanger · 999 episodes with transcripts

Take a deep dive into History’s biggest moments with Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook. Explore the stories of History’s most brutal rulers, deadly battles, and world-changing events.

Spoken has transcripts of 999 The Rest Is History episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 11, 2026.

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999 episodes of The Rest Is History have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

archive.sh
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/1537788786/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

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Latest The Rest Is History transcripts

King Arthur: The Once & Future King (Part 1)

October 11, 2026

Dominic Sandbrook (0:30)

But rather, I would say, here in this world, he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon the tomb this, Hic Iacet Arthurus, Rexquandam Rexque Futurus.

Here lies Arthur, the once and future king. The most stirring, the most haunting epitaph in all of English literature, and arguably all of English history. So that comes at the end of the Mort D'Arthur, the great prose epic that was written by Sir Thomas Mallory during the Wars of the Roses. So in 15th century…

Tom Holland (1:39)

Yes, the golden age of the Round Table, a time when knights were at their boldest and ladies were at their fairest. And yet throughout Mallory's account of it, the knowledge that the Round Table is going to end up broken and its knights piled up as corpses shadows the entire story.

And it's the death of Arthur or is it a death after he's received a mortal wound from his son Mordred in the last battle that he will ever fight. This is what sets the seal on the tragedy. But to repeat, is Arthur actually dead? This is the great mystery. And Mallory's account of his fate, which you just read out…

Dominic Sandbrook (3:26)

I completely agree. I fell in love with the stories of King Arthur when I was very, very young because I had a really basic children's version when I was probably five or six or something. King Arthur was my gateway drug into history.

My love of King Arthur and the stories of King Arthur predated any historical interests that I had. And of course, one of the things that people always love about King Arthur is precisely this idea that he's the once and future King, that he's sleeping and will come again to save the people of Britain in their hour…

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